Twenty Questions for Leaders to Ask: The Power of the Right Questions - BusinessWeek

Twenty Questions for Leaders to Ask: The Power of the Right Questions - BusinessWeek

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Secret To Happiness

Don't look up, look down. This was a lesson taught to me today over lunch. What is interesting is this simple line that sums up the work of Daniel Gilbert in his book Stumbling on Happiness. By the way this is a book you really want to read. It hits the major points in brain research and how and why we act the way we do. And how often it does not lead us to more happiness. Simply put - lower your expectations.

Chicago Finacilal Record Reviews Just Ask Leadership

The Chicago Financial Record included a review of JUST ASK LEADERSHIP in its debut issue this September. The Chicago Financial Record is a monthly paper distributed to businesses throughout the Chicago area, featuring business news, interviews, and book reviews.

Cartoons as a way to get your message across quickly

I worked with Corey Sauer a cartoon artist when I started my book Just Ask Leadership. Although the cartoons did not make it into the book they are one of the most viewed areas of the CO2 Partners site. Please have fun looking at some of these.... Cartoons. Also a great video by
the Robert Mankoff - Cartoon Editor of the New York Times.

Charter for Compassion

Charter for Compassion

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Charter for Compassion

Charter for Compassion

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Lead Quietly: Just Ask Leadership - Do you look good from below?

Lead Quietly: Just Ask Leadership - Do you look good from below?

Fastidious spelling snobs pushed over the edge

Books, blogs and obsessiveness mark a brand-new war of the words

Good grammar

By Diane Mapes
msnbc.com contributor
updated 6:56 a.m. CT, Tues., Feb. 3, 2009

Some people avoid Krispy Kreme because of the calories. Angela Nickerson won’t go there because of the Ks.

“I confess, I’m a spelling, grammar and punctuation snob,” says the 35-year-old travel writer from Sacramento, Calif. “And I won’t patronize businesses with misspelled signs. It’s like hearing fingernails running down a chalkboard.”

Life isn’t easy for language lovers such as Nickerson. Over the past decade, her beloved mother tongue has been mashed, mangled and mistreated by everyone from a sitting president to a squadron of texting preteens. Misspelled menus have become the stuff of bad dreams. (Try our Sweat and Sour Chicken!) Punctuation is not only hit-and-miss, it’s potentially hazardous. (Employees must “wash hands.”) Read the rest on MSNBC

Finding - The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything - Book Review

Ken Robinson is one smart and funny guy. Before you read this review you have to watch this TED video - he has gotten millions of views on the web. It was this video that inspired me to read his book.



In The Element Sir Ken Robinson explores how to find your Element. He draws on many sources and some extremely interesting interviews and research. This includes the fact that Paul McCartney did not even like music classes in school, although he loved making music. Can you even imagine what it must feel like to know you had Paul McCartney in your Music Class and you could not inspire him. He uses stories like this one to pull the reader in to his book and make a compelling discussion on how institutions like our school systems are leading our minds away from our own element and replacing it with conformity.

As a TEDalcoholic I must confess I enjoyed the book - I found many references to the TED talks that I have watched or listen to over the years. As well as many authors on the subject of creativity, flow and mind mapping like Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi or Tony Buzan. He both explores the micro and macro nature of learning the element as it relates to you and to the world. Do yourself a favor a find The Element first at the store then in yourself.

Flexability, Adaptability and Resilence in Leadership

Leadership in crisis may become a constant for leaders today. The way you may have lead before may not be working for you any longer. You may have to go from a position of knowing to that of not knowing to lead in an environment of uncertainty.

Paradoxically this takes a great deal of learning to learn that you really don't know as much as you think you know. One needs to learn about how the brain works and stores information in invariant patterns. That means that the way the brain is storing information occurs by stacking things that are associated rather than perfect replicas. It creates more efficient storage capacity and not as effective for memory recall. If the item is related you will likely see those things that you expect to see, those images that are frequent, those that carry emotional attachment among other processes. That all means what you hear, see and feel may not be as factual as you may think. You will not easily believe this as a leader so you will have to dig deep learn more about it before you can even let this information in.

Many of you will want to dismiss this blog entry just because you don't want to agree with what is being said. You will try, the credibility route, to disprove who is the author? Who is this Gary Cohen anyways? Perhaps you will find poor writing style or grammatical errors so you can use that to dismiss the writing so you will not have to let it in. This is how the brain works, this is how you get lead down a path that is not helpful to your leadership of others. Leaders can no longer count on command and control to lead others. They now need to move to understanding, engagement, alignment, and accountability by asking the right questions at the right time. That only comes when you move to a place of not knowing.

It is by moving to a place where you can be comfortable with living with uncertainty that you can lead through it with resilience. Resilience happens when your need to be right, to be the smartest person in the room and your linear way of thinking obscures your reality and prevents you from adapting.

Leadership Trust

Often leadership experts look at trust as in "How do I get those that I work with to trust me?" It is my contention that trust for leaders start with the leader trusting their co-workers first. Often leaders don't trust their team members not because the team members are not trust worthy, but because the leader has issues around trust. Trust is one of the key component of leadership and if the leader does not trust their team and organization how is it possible to lead them.

Just Ask Leadership only works if you trust your team. What would be the point of asking anyone a question if you did not trust their answer? Leadership Trust starts with the leader trusting the team first. It is not about the leader earning the employees trust.

Matt Crowe interviews Gary Cohen Executive Coach and leadership development expert on Leading

Matt Crowe's radio show

Every Friday at 1PM CST tune into The Matt Crowe Show where Entrepreneur, Author, and Venture Capitalist Matt Crowe hosts a live show about business, entrepreneurship, philosophy, and life. He will have regular guest appearances from other successful entrepreneurs and innovators, authors, leaders, and visionaries. Listen and call in with your business and life questions and talk with Matt and his guests!! You can go to www.mattcrowe.com to learn more about Matt and is where he writes daily.

StrategyDriven Podcast Special Edition Interview Gary Cohen

StrategyDriven Podcast Special Edition 20b - An Interview with Gary Cohen, author of Just Ask Leadership, part 2 of 2

Posted by StrategyDriven on September 24, 2009

StrategyDriven Podcasts focus on the tools and techniques executives and managers can use to improve their organization’s alignment and accountability to ultimately achieve superior results. These podcasts elaborate on the best practice and warning flag articles on the StrategyDriven website.

Special Edition 20b - An Interview with Gary Cohen, author of Just Ask Leadership, part 2 of 2 explores how leaders can enhance their organization’s alignment and accountability through question-based leadership. During our discussion, Gary Cohen, Partner and co-Founder of CO2 Partners and author of Just Ask Leadership: Why Great Managers Always Ask the Right Questions shares his insights regarding…
• a process for determining what questions to ask for a given situation
• attributes of good questions
• impacts of asking too many or too few questions and how to identify when that point is reached
• how to incorporate questions into one’s leadership style

Additional Information

In addition to the invaluable insights Gary shares in Just Ask Leadership and this special edition podcast are the additional resources accessible from his Just Ask Leadership wesbite. The values assessment discussed during the podcast can be accessed at http://www.ceotest.com/. Gary’s book, Just Ask Leadership, can be purchased by clicking here.

5 Time Mangement Applications - Be more productive!

Time management is difficult for many leaders. This blog entry from Lifehacker lists five amazing tools for tracking where your time is going without creating a lot of time to operate them. Check them out: Time Management.

List of Best Leadership Events – Top Events for CEO’s

Top 16 Leadership Conferences - Research indicates that the top CEO’s of large enterprises get asked to speak on average 3.4 times per week. These are some of the top conferences that they speak at and that are well attended by the top leaders today. This list is a compliation of research done by; Weber Shandwick, Business Week and Burson-Marsteller The Studies Reveals the Top Most Valued Podiums for CEOs and C-Suite Executives. If you want to know where the thought leaders are presenting follow the links to the top leadership events:


1. World Economic Forum
2. TED
3. Aspen Ideas Festival
4. Milken Institute
5. Clinton Global Initiative
6. CECP Board of Boards
7. Chief Executives’ Club Boston
8. The Wall Street Journal Conference “D”
9. Forbes Conference
10. Fortune Conference i-Meme
11. World Business Forum
12. Detroit Economic Club
13. Economist Global Agenda
14. CFO Magazine
15. Consumer Electronics Show
16. Wharton Leadership

Great Leaders Ask Great Questions - CollegeRecruiter.com

As leaders advance, they tend to ask fewer questions and provide more answers. But according to entrepreneur and executive coach Gary Cohen, this is precisely the wrong approach. Based on interviews with nearly 100 leaders, including Fortune 500 CEOs, small business owners, military commanders, and heads of nonprofits- as well as his own business experience, having grown ACI Telecentrics from two employees to 2,200- Cohen discovered that one of the keys to leadership success lies in asking questions. In his new book, JUST ASK LEADERSHIP: Why Great Managers Always Ask the Right Questions (McGraw Hill/September 2009), he explains how CEOs, managers, and supervisors alike can learn to ask the right questions in the right contexts- enabling individuals and organizations to thrive.

"Leadership is about allowing others the chance to flourish," writes Cohen. "And you do that by asking questions." This empowers coworkers to find solutions, embrace responsibility, and become accountable. Moreover, it opens the door to greater productivity and creativity. Indeed, more than ever before, leaders can't know everything. By seeking others' input, they can inspire powerful and positive change.

JUST ASK LEADERSHIP details specific questions to pose in particular situations while also explaining how to create a culture of question-based leadership. Cohen addresses five critical areas: Read more at College Recruiter

Markets Media Magazine on Just Ask - September/October 2009

By Markets Media Magazine

StrategyDriven Podcast Special Edition

StrategyDriven Podcast Special Edition 20a - An Interview with Gary Cohen, author of Just Ask Leadership, part 1 of 2
Posted by StrategyDriven on September 17, 2009

StrategyDriven Podcasts focus on the tools and techniques executives and managers can use to improve their organization’s alignment and accountability to ultimately achieve superior results. These podcasts elaborate on the best practice and warning flag articles on the StrategyDriven website.

Special Edition 20a - An Interview with Gary Cohen, author of Just Ask Leadership, part 1 of 2 explores how leaders can enhance their organization’s alignment and accountability through question-based leadership. During part 1 of our discussion, Gary Cohen, Partner and co-Founder of CO2 Partners and author of Just Ask Leadership: Why Great Managers Always Ask the Right Questions shares his insights regarding…

what question-based leadership is
quantiative and qualitative benefits realized by those using question-based leadership
how question-based leadership drives organizational alignment and accountability
importance of identifying the decision-maker for a given situation

Strategy Driven Podcast Read More

Align Your Organization and Become StrategyDriven!
Register for a complimentary StrategyDriven membership and receive instant access to our Organizational Performance Measures whitepaper series. Using these whitepapers, you'll learn how to create a performance measurement system that drives superior performance by aligning managerial decisions and employee actions with your corporate strategy.

Listening - A different way to actively listen

For years we have heard about how communications works with a sender and a receiver. What this model does not help people understand is what is happening for both the sender and receiver cognitive processes. What is happening is a process of connecting new information or input with past information or input. By doing this those connections create meaning for each party. Often the receiver is finishing the senders message by predicting what he or she is going to say. Based on the beginning of the connection process. Jeff Hawkins author of On Intelligence describe the way the process the brain works in an effort to invent a new way of computing.



We see this notion of connection in how the brain works to how technology is trying to mesh-up the way we work with computers. Shiftables are at the very beginning of this trend. Shiftables were developed by David Merrill at the MIT Labs.



In Just Ask Leadership you learn that asking questions is a powerful way to help your employees engage, align and connect. This happens best when you as the leader help co-workers find those connections by asking the right questions to find those connections. This is similar the meaning making that Jeff Hawkins is studying in brain research at the Redwood Neuroscience Institute, and David Merrill is doing research on Shiftables at the MIT Media Lab. It is trying to facilitate the connections to the brain to expedite and enhance the cognitive resources available to each of us.

Just Ask Leadership - Has a 2X Multiple to increase engagement and alignment

Dan Ariel speaks about his book Predictably Irrational - a great book if you have not yet read it. He describes in this video behavioral economics. Another way to describe this is the science of behavior that the business world has not yet adapted. Dan Ariel shows us how humans continue to see things in one way and make decisions on those observations even when they are wrong. In Just Ask Leadership Assessment CO2 Partners has discovered that leaders who lead from a belief of not knowing verses that of knowing have a multiple of two times that of engagement of their team and their teams alignment. Another words if the leader suspends their belief in their way of knowing what to do and allow others to participate or make the decisions they will increase performance. How does this relate to Dan Ariel's work, often leaders struggle to suspend their belief in knowing - thinking that they really do have the right answer. Dan Ariel's work really helps leaders understand that what they believe is true is not always actually true.

Are you listening

Many people today pretend to listen - how many really do? Ask your friends, spouse, relatives if they feel heard by you? Then share with us what you learned.

The Key to Successful Leadership? Just Ask

by Agatha Gilmore

As we progress through school — from kindergarten to 12th grade, from college to that graduate degree — we achieve success by responding to questions correctly. Think about it: The more you know, the better you do and the more rewarded you become. Once you’ve made it to the top, you’re basically considered an expert whose job it is to provide answers.

The system doesn’t change much when translated to the workplace, as a new hire gradually progresses into a leader. But for organizations to get the most out of their people, executives must start asking, rather than answering, questions, said Gary Cohen, founder and managing partner at CO2 Partners, an executive coaching firm, and author of Just Ask Leadership: Why Great Leaders Always Ask the Right Questions. Continue Article in Chief Learning Officier

HR.COM Review of Just Ask Leadership

As leaders advance, they tend to ask fewer questions and provide more answers. But according to entrepreneur and executive coach Gary Cohen, this is precisely the wrong approach. Based on interviews with nearly 100 leaders, including Fortune 500 CEOs, small business owners, military commanders, and heads of nonprofits– as well as his own business experience, having grown ACI Telecentrics from two employees to 2,200– Cohen discovered that one of the keys to leadership success lies in asking questions. In his new book, JUST ASK LEADERSHIP: Why Great Managers Always Ask the Right Questions (McGraw Hill/September 2009), he explains how CEOs, managers, and supervisors alike can learn to ask the right questions in the right contexts– enabling individuals and organizations to thrive.

“Leadership is about allowing others the chance to flourish,” writes Cohen. “And you do that by asking questions.” This empowers coworkers to find solutions, embrace responsibility, and become accountable. Moreover, it opens the door to greater productivity and creativity. Indeed, more than ever before, leaders can’t know everything. By seeking others’ input, they can inspire powerful and positive change. Read Remaining Review HR.com