One of the most significant periods of my life was the three years I studied under the world’s greatest business consultant, Peter Drucker. Dr. Drucker is known as the father of modern management, but he also contributed to the creation of marketing as a professional discipline, wrote extensively about entrepreneurship and innovation, and is generally regarded as the greatest business philosopher of all-time.
There is not a single day that I don’t hear his voice in my head as I work through customer problems. His advice has become the foundational pillars of my work and in many respects, my life.
But there is one piece of advice he gave me that is remarkably useful to me in this overwhelming world of change, and I think it will help you, too. Let’s reveal that today.
Immersed in the problem
I studied under Dr. Drucker while pursuing an MBA at the Claremont Graduate University. He had retired from most of his professional life and devoted his time to mentoring students in the business school that now bore his name.
He would sit on the edge of a desk with a carafe of coffee and talk about his books. It was impossible to outline his talks as he took us on a jagged journey through his life and the fascinating people he met along the way.
Dr. Drucker taught us through the Harvard case study method. We were assigned a long text detailing a complex business problem. Over weeks of classes, we would dissect the issues from every angle. As business leaders, our tendency was to try to solve the case and resolve the problem.
And that’s when Dr. Drucker would go nuts.
It’s not about the right answers
This class was filled with experienced leaders eager to display their intelligence and insight by “solving” the case study.
Nothing irked Dr. Drucker more.
“The people in this case study have been working in their business for 30 years or more,” he would say. “What makes you so arrogant to think that you can solve the problem when they can’t? Your job is not to have the right answers. Your jobs is to have the right questions.”
This might be the most important advice of my professional life and informed how I approach all my business consulting assignments. I approach business problems very humbly because I am never the expert in the room. Why would I have the right answers? However, I can guide people to the right questions — the real key to a resolution.
I’ve found that most leaders have the knowledge and insight to solve their problems if they know where to find an answer.
Relevance of the right questions
The marketing world is far too complex to be an expert in everything. I’m not sure you can be an expert in anything! However, you must be immersed enough in the day’s issues to ask the right questions. You have to have a sense of what is possible.
I think curiosity is the most important soft skill for marketers today. For me, asking the right questions is not just a prerequisite to effective consulting. It helps me become a better author, speaker, and teacher.
Asking the right questions is also the true heart of all great content creation. If you put the work into finding the right questions, great content will surely follow.
Jay Acunzo and I just dropped a fun podcast episode demonstrating the opportunity to ask the right questions. We challenged each other to pose questions that the other person had never been asked before. And it worked! I invite you to have some fun with us and enter a world of challenging questions.
All you have to do is click here >
Click here to enjoy Marketing Companion Episode 305
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Illustration courtesy MidJourney
