- Why People Ask Tough Questions
- Why Businesspeople Ask Tough Questions
- Blood Sport
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
■ Why Businesspeople Ask Tough Questions ■
Businesspeople, who are not concerned about show ratings, ask tough questions for entirely different reasons. Some are disciples of Socrates. They question everything to stimulate critical thinking. During a Suasive program I delivered to a group of Cisco managers in their Paris offices, one of them, Helene Poirier, repeatedly challenged my methodology. At the end of the session, Helene came up to me and explained that she wasn’t trying to be difficult, she was just doing what she had learned to do in the French education system:
We were taught to think with the “Cartesian” method, from the principles of René Descartes, the seventeenth-century philosopher. Whenever ideas are discussed, we look for all possible angles of view: What supports it, and who, how? What goes against it, and who, how? What conclusion, opinion, decision can we rationally draw?8
Other than the Socratic and Cartesian methods (the latter reads like a mission statement for reporters), the primary reason businesspeople ask challenging questions has to do with the inherent nature of presentations. Whenever you present, your goal is to get your target audience to change: to get prospective customers to buy a product or service they have never owned or to get existing customers to buy a new version of a product or service they already own.
In that highest stakes of all presentations, the IPO roadshow, the goal is to get investor audiences to change: to buy a stock that never existed. As a matter of fact, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission requires that offering companies specifically state their intentions in print. They must publish a prospectus containing a boilerplate sentence that reads, “There has been no prior public market for the company’s common stock.” In other words, “Invest at your own risk.”
Caveat emptor.
Change is the goal in almost every exchange in business, and most human beings are resistant to change, so they kick the tires.
You are the tires.