Smart Questions - by Gerald Nadler & William Chandon (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Smart Questions offers an entirely new framework for creating solutions. Drawn from the authors' many years of research and field experience, the Smart Questions Approach reveals how the leading creators of solutions in almost every profession and walk of life--including business, government, education, and even in families--think and approach their assignments. The author's holistic thinking approach shows how to use three "foundation" questions--focusing on uniqueness, purposeful information, and systems--which must be explored for every problem. These three questions, an essential starting point for exploring problems, in turn lead to other key questions that will ultimately create effective solutions.

From the Back Cover

There are many reasons that business leaders, managers, and private individuals go about problem solving in the wrong way. As Gerald Nadler and William Chandon point out, most people have learned to use the wrong framework or paradigm for working through issues and problems. In essence, they approach problems using a thinking mode that leads to excessive if not pointless data collection, analysis-paralysis, and static solutions that tend to only patch up the situation for a short period of time.

Smart Questions offers an entirely new framework for creating solutions. Drawn from the authors' many years of research and field experience, the Smart Questions Approach reveals how the leading creators of solutions in almost every profession and walk of life--including business, government, education, and even in families--think and approach their assignments. The author's holistic thinking approach shows how to use three "foundation" questions--focusing on uniqueness, purposeful information, and systems--which must be explored for every problem. These three questions, an essent ial starting point for exploring problems, in turn lead to other key questions that will ultimately create effective solutions.

Smart Questions will completely retrain the reader to become a more intelligent thinker and a better creator of solutions--with an ability to develop creative, purposeful, long-term answers in a wide range of situations.

About the Author

Gerald Nadler is president of the Center for Breakthrough Thinking Inc., an international firm of consulting affiliates promoting Smart Questions and other planning and solution-finding approaches. He is also IBM Chair Emeritus in Engineering Management at the University of Southern California. Nadler has written over two hundred published articles and fourteen books, including the second edition of Breakthrough Thinking: The Seven Principles of Creative Problem Solving (with Shozo Hibino, Prima Publishing, 1994), a first-edition selection of the Fortune Book Club, Book-of-the-Month Club, Newbridge Book Club, FastTrack Best Business Books on Tape, and one of Computerworld's Best Books of 1990.

William J. Chandon is a vice president of the Center for Breakthrough Thinking and teaches management at St. Mary's College. He has over fifteen years' experience in the fields of organizational development and business transformation and has consulted with many and varied government, non-profit, and commercial businesses from many industries.