Ask More: The Power of Questions to Open Doors, Uncover Solutions, and Spark Change pdfdrive com

Would you buy a Tesla?
Who’s the most inspiring person you’ve ever met and why?
Set the Stage, Set the Tone
When it comes to hosting, I’ve never met anybody quite like Chris Schroeder.
An entrepreneur and an investor, Chris was a digital pioneer, leading
WashingtonPost.com
in its early days. He invested in a health-related website,

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built it big, then sold it for a handsome profit. He traveled the world to meet
young entrepreneurs who are redefining technology and globalization, and wrote
a book.
Chris is a question machine. He recalled that as a young boy, he spent hours
with his Italian grandmother, watching her cook, smelling the aromatic tapestry
of pastas and meat, onions and garlic, spices and herbs, and asking all he could
about the recipes and the family. What was in it? How did she make it? Where
did it come from? Where were they from?
Ever since I’ve known him, Chris has been like that—asking incessantly,
deeply, about people, ideas, events, and the world around us. He’s an intense and
caring magnet for other people as well. They seek his advice because he listens
and he asks persistently about opportunities and obstacles, vulnerabilities, and
trade-offs.
Exploding with ideas, Chris is driven by his manic curiosity. In his book
Startup Rising, he argued that young people in the Middle East embracing
technology and innovation will ultimately transform the region in positive and
profound ways. For all the turmoil, Chris believes young twenty-first-century
innovators are hard at work and will bend history toward knowledge and
progress. He is a stubborn optimist.
About twice a month, Chris and his wife, Sandy, host a dinner party. He is a
blue-jeans casual, Harvard-educated guy whose interests run from food and
sports to technology and foreign policy. Having inherited his grandmother’s love
of cooking, he serves up fresh pasta, great wine, homemade everything
accompanied by a feast of ideas. His dinner parties are a cross between Top Chef
and Meet the Press. On this night, the menu featured fresh pasta amatriciana,
lamb stew with mint, and four wines from Italy. He’d sent an email to all the
guests twenty-four hours earlier, commenting, “Several of you have asked kindly
if you can bring anything, and the answer is no, except an Uber if you will be
enjoying some of our wine.”
But think about this, he wrote:
What is something you see in your world that blows you away right
now?
Or, what is obvious in your world that to the rest of us may be
extremely unobvious?
By the third wine … we may figure out how to save the entire world
…

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Five couples gathered that Saturday evening at Schroeder’s home, big and
warm and welcoming. He and Sandy made gracious introductions, since some of
the guests had never met. After some socializing, we moved into the dining
room for the main event.
Chris served. Sandy was happy to let him run the show. Their teenage son
helped, pouring water and wine, lingering when something caught his ear. After
welcoming all of us to his table, Chris slid into his role as host, first offering an
observation, followed by a gust of questions. Traveling for his book had given
him remarkable access and taken him to places few could visit. He’d just
returned from Iran, a place that had dominated headlines and American foreign
policy since Islamic revolutionaries stormed the American embassy in Tehran
and took hostages in 1979. But now what? Chris told us he had met a new
generation of young innovators churning with aspiration, anxious to play, defiant
in their ideas, and believing in change. These entrepreneurs were more
connected and more empowered than ever, using technology to network with
like-minded young people. He saw them collaborating online with other
entrepreneurs and innovators around the world. If they had a smartphone, they
were not restricted by physical frontiers or cultural expectations. Chris told the
story of a young woman who was trying to finance her software startup. She was
raising the money to bring her idea to market. And there were thousands like her.
He turned to the table. None of us had been to Iran but he threw out some
questions we all could chew on.