Success is constantly a journey. You’re always trying to better understand the sources of your success and the things that could imperil you. If you actually think that you have all those answers, you stop asking the questions. Well, what happens if, in fact, you were wrong about part of it? And then things start to go awry because you’ve lost that inquisitiveness, the will to try to truly understand. You may, in fact, put the accelerator on the wrong variables because you were wrong about why you were successful in the first place. And so I think the sense of a relentless curiosity and a relentless quest to understand … reflects the way that certain leaders navigated a world that was very foggy.
That’s the thing that’s so hard, to understand things at the moment. Well, if you have really great people around you to begin with and you ask them the right questions, you’re probably more likely to at least have reasonably good answers than if you just assert the statement. …And it’s sort of an empirical observation about the Socratic nature of many of the best people that we’ve studied. They’re great with questions. The funny thing is, when they didn’t know the answer, they usually knew the right question to ask.
Author: Jim Collins
Source: Ivey Business Journal
Subjects: Leadership, Success / Failure
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