Hal Gregersen – författare

2018 Nautilus Book Awards Silver Winner

What if you could unlock a better answer to your most vexing problem—in your workplace, community, or home life—just by changing the question?

Talk to creative problem-solvers and they will often tell you, the key to their success is asking a different question.

Take Debbie Sterling, the social entrepreneur who created GoldieBlox. The idea came when a friend complained about too few women in engineering and Sterling wondered aloud: "why are all the great building toys made for boys?" Or consider Nobel laureate Richard Thaler, who asked: "would it change economic theory if we stopped pretending people were rational?" Or listen to Jeff Bezos whose relentless approach to problem solving has fueled Amazon’s exponential growth: “Getting the right question is key to getting the right answer.”  

Great questions like these have a catalytic quality—that is, they dissolve barriers to creative thinking and channel the pursuit of solutions into new, accelerated pathways. Often, the moment they are voiced, they have the paradoxical effect of being utterly surprising yet instantly obvious.

For innovation and leadership guru Hal Gregersen, the power of questions has always been clear—but it took some years for the follow-on question to hit him: If so much depends on fresh questions, shouldn’t we know more about how to arrive at them? That sent him on a research quest ultimately including over two hundred interviews with creative thinkers. Questions Are the Answer delivers the insights Gregersen gained about the conditions that give rise to catalytic questions—and breakthrough insights—and how anyone can create them.

A new classic, cited by leaders and media around the globe as a highly recommended read for anyone interested in innovation.

In this bestselling book, authors Jeff Dyer (Innovation Capital and The Innovator''s Method), Hal Gregersen (Questions Are the Answer), and Clayton M. Christensen (The Innovator''s Dilemma, The Innovator''s Solution, and How Will You Measure Your Life?) build on what we know about disruptive innovation to show how individuals can develop the skills necessary to move progressively from idea to impact.

By identifying behaviors of the world''s best innovators--from leaders at Amazon and Apple to those at Google, Tesla, and Salesforce.com--the authors outline five discovery skills that distinguish innovative entrepreneurs and executives from ordinary managers: associating, questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting. Using the same diagnostics used in their study of successful innovators, the authors show you how to evaluate, and build upon, your own "DNA" code through in-depth advice and stories that demonstrate each discovery skill in action and how to develop it.

Once you know the behaviors and skills of successful innovators, Dyer, Gregersen, and Christensen explain how you can use them to generate ideas, collaborate with colleagues to implement them, and build innovation skills throughout your organization to sharpen its competitive edge. This innovation advantage will translate into a premium in your company''s stock price--an innovation premium--which is possible only by building the code for innovation right into your organization''s people, processes, and guiding philosophies. This book shows you how.

Now updated with a new introduction and fresh examples, The Innovator''s DNA is the essential resource for individuals and teams who want to strengthen their innovative prowess.