Hello <<First Name>>,
The last time I wrote was on Question Day 2014 (Einstein’s birthday, March 14). Thanks to everyone who tweeted or shared information on that day. I got sent a lot of great Beautiful Questions—nice to see the idea resonating with people.
Here’s some interesting highlights of what’s been going on since then.
I’ve been getting great feedback on the April 2014
cover feature I wrote for Southwest Airlines’ Spirit magazine that tied together Van Phillips and his prosthetics story (featured in
A More Beautiful Question) with larger ideas about questioning. Even if you already read about Van in the book, this article has some new info on the interesting things this athlete/inventor’s been up to recently, as well as a fresh take on how we can all benefit from his questioning methods.
The New York Times Book Review published a special edition last week about thought leadership and management books, and AMBQ made the shortlist. I was honored to be reviewed next to Ben Horowitz’s
The Hard Thing About Hard Things, about Silicon Valley startups, and Margaret Heffernan’s treatise about the pitfalls of competition,
A Bigger Prize. See the AMBQ review here.
I’m in the midst of writing a
3-part series about Beautiful Questions for Fast Company. The first two articles, about using questions to
overcome your fear of failure and to find and
ignite your life passion, are flying around the internet, and
I’ve posted them on my blog if you’re curious. Right now I’m working on the third piece about the
3 questions that can help you solve any problem.
One of the pleasures—and pains—of writing a book is the
hours of interviews you must do, which often get reduced to only a paragraph or line in the book. Looking over the list of extraordinary people I spoke to for AMBQ I’ve decided I’ll periodically post some of these edited interviews on the AMBQ blog.
The first in this series is a discussion I had with the wonderful character actor and improvisation teacher Stephen Tobolowsky (
@Tobolowsky), about the uses of improv in real life and how important questioning is to getting to the truth of things. Check out
“Improvisation works because it’s about the leap and not about the landing.”
The thing I’m happiest to report is that it turns out a lot of you are as interested in the art and science of questioning as I am. I’ve been getting a bunch of media mentions, with some very perceptive questions and thoughts about questioning. If you’re interested, I’m collecting them all on my
In the News/Media page, but here are two that just happened that I haven’t even had a chance to post on that page yet:
Drucker on the Dial: a monthly podcast on management and leadership by the prestigious Drucker Institute. Host Phalana Tiller spoke with me and, later, Luz Santana, co-founder of The Right Question Institute, about the art of asking questions and the power of inquiry.
800CEORead’s “Thinker in Residence”: A three-part series on my journey with questioning from the pre-eminent business book specialists, 800CEORead.
* * * *
Thank you, as always for your interest in AMBQ, and hope to continue the conversation with you either via Twitter, Facebook, or on my blog.
