Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

Peter Drucker was famous for this: when he toured companies for which he was consulting, he would chat up floor managers and line workers and ask questions like, “What business are you in?” and “Who are your customers?” and “How’s business?” Simple, embarrassing questions, because if you’re plain and pointed enough, it’s usually very easy to uncover the gaping chasms between the ways we do business and the ways we could do business better.

Tom Peters posted a long list of simple “Have you . . .” questions on his blog this week:

“Top 50″ “Have yous”

The list includes such potential blush-inducers as these:

• Have you in the last 10 days … visited a customer?
• Have you called a customer … TODAY?
• Have you thanked a front-line employee for a small act of helpfulness … in the last three days?

Those questions seem so prosaic, so non-threatening, until you get caught up inside the belly of a company of any size. It’s very, very easy to work your tail off, possibly wasting substantial time doing many things besides your core function, and thereby lose track of who the customer is, what the customer wants, and how well your business is meeting that desire.

In my naive, younger days, I sometimes inadvertently brought meetings to a grinding halt by asking questions like, “How will that make us more money?” or “How do we know what our customers want here?” — not because I’m some Drucker-like genius, but simply because I benefit/suffer from a tendency to ask the “dumb” questions that are on my mind. It’s amazing the looks (and verbal/nonverbal responses) you get when you ask a question like “How will this make us more money?”

In the long run, though, it’s tonic. It’s great when we can hit flow states — personally and organizationally — where the business just hums along. In the long run, though, growing pains are often inevitable. And some of the most fruitful ones come from answering awkward questions like those of Peters and Drucker (and their sub-semi-junior-wannabe follower, Walker).