Hal Gregersen is the executive director of the MIT Leadership Center and has authored or co-authored ten books, translated into fifteen languages. He is also the founder of the 4-24 Project, an initiative dedicated to rekindling the provocative power of asking the right questions.
In this episode, we discuss how to cultivate innovative and disruptive ideas.
An innovation and leadership guru, Hal is Executive Director of the MIT Leadership Center and Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. While Hal’s expertise expands across all areas of innovative leadership, asking the right questions cuts deeply across all of his work. He challenges organizations and individuals to question the way we think and act to build a better, more creative world.
To grasp how leaders find and ask the right questions – ones that disrupt the world – Hal’s new book, “Questions are the Answer: A Breakthrough Approach to Your Most Vexing Problems at Work and In Life” (Harper Collins, coming out later this year), builds on 200+ interviews with renowned business, technology, education, government, social enterprise, and artistic leaders. This question-centric project surfaces crucial insights into how leaders build better questions to unlock game-changing solutions. The first article from the project -“Bursting the CEO Bubble: Why Executives Should Talk Less and Ask More” (March/April 2017 Harvard Business Review) – explores how senior leaders can ask better questions to unlock what they don’t know they don’t know – before it’s too late. The second article from the project – “Better Brainstorming: Focus on Questions, Not Answers, for Breakthrough Insights” (March/April 2018 Harvard Business Review) – outlines how his unique Question Burst™ method can help anyone solve problems faster and better by asking nothing but questions about a vexing challenge for four fast and furious minutes. Hal is also founder of The 4-24 Project, an initiative dedicated to rekindling the provocative power of asking the right questions in adults so they can pass this crucial creativity skill onto the next generation.
Putting his insight into practice, he is the creator of a unique executive development experience “Leadership and the Lens: Learning at the Intersection of Innovation and Image-Making.” The course draws on Hal’s two passions – photography and innovation–to teach participants how to ask radically better questions and change their impact as leaders. Ranked consistently as one of the world’s most influential management thinkers by Thinkers50, Hal regularly delivers inspirational keynote speeches, motivational executive seminars and transformational coaching experiences. He also works with a diverse set of companies to help them master the challenges of innovation and change, from Chanel to IBM to the World Economic Forum.
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MINDED is an outlet for people who want to learn from industry and creative leaders that have an innate drive for excellence. Our guests set themselves apart by challenging the norm and pushing ideas forward. In a never-ending pursuit to succeed, we thrive to have an in-depth conversation about life, business and the world we live in. Hosted by Yuri Xavier.
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