Asking Open-Ended Questions

A few reminders:

• Try to think about things that are important and things that are knowable. Now, there are things that are important that are not knowable...There are things that are knowable but not important. We don’t want to clutter our minds up with those. So we say, “What is important and what is knowable?” And what among the things that fall within those two categories can we translate into some kind of an action that is useful…
• The challenge = to see things as they are, undistorted by your own mind.
• Find truth.
• Listen to the point of being uncomfortable with the silence.
• Keep Mike Wallace’s advice about silence in the back of your mind. Silence is golden as an interviewing technique: “The single most interesting thing that you can do in television, I find, is to ask a good question and then let the answer hang there for two or three or four seconds as though you’re expecting more. You know what? They get a little embarrassed and give you more.”

Question List:

• Where or how do you spend a majority of your time and what do you use as a barometer for your return on invested time?
• Of your competitors, who do you respect the most and why?
• How much of your success do you attribute to luck vs. skill? Why do you say that?
• If you were just starting out today, would you enter the same industry? Why or why not?
• How do you define risk?
• Which areas do you view through a fixed mindset lens? Which areas do you view through a growth mindset lens?
• Tell me why you’ve been successful and how do you sustain it?
• What three things would you tell a friend about how to be successful in your company?
• What is really hard for new hires to get used to in this firm?
• What do you want to be known for?
• How do you measure whether you are successful?
• If you were a private business, how would you operate differently?