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This Focused Performance Weblog started life as a "business management blog" containing links and commentary related primarily to organizational effectiveness with a "Theory of Constraints" perspective, but is in the process of evolving towards primary content on interactive and mobile marketing. Think of it as about Focusing marketing messages for enhanced Performance. If you are on an archive page, current postings are found here.

Thursday, May 13, 2004

Why? --
"What concerns me is not the way things are, but rather the way people think things are."
    - Epictetus
In the Darwin article, The Power of Why, John Baldoni writes...
"Why is a word favored by those not satisfied with the way things are. These individuals tend to be inventors, entrepreneurs, scientists, social capitalists and politicians. By nature, they are catalysts. Inventors and entrepreneurs wonder about alternatives using why to provoke thought about what might be and try and quantify it as a product or service. Scientists use why as part of the scientific method that begins with a hypothesis and ends with proof. Engineers use why as a means of diagnosis: what happens and why. Social capitalists and politicians alike use why to question assumptions about the way organizations and governments serve their constituents. For all of these types of people, why becomes the trigger word for invoking alternatives as well as beginning the process of bringing people along to alternate points of view."
Problem solving and innovation is all about, as Baldoni suggests in his list of uses of "why," "questioning assumptions" and "bursting preconceptions." Plumbing the depths of such potentially erroneous beliefs requires the willingness and ability to ask "why" effectively. (Link via Jack Vinson)

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