Book: Enquire to Inspire: 20 Questions to Mentor Your Innovation Team to Success ^Sale

Project Overview

Enquire to Inspire: 20 Questions to Mentor Your Innovation Team to Success

By Bill Murray

 

 

Book Description

Work doesn't have to suck!

In fact, it can be cathartic and life-changing-- if your search team has the right permissions and resources to set it up for success. But only an interrogative leader can deliver these. 

My new book, Enquire to Inspire: 20 Questions to Mentor Your Innovation Team to Success, will free you from the burden of directive management for the satisfaction of mentoring through questions; and it will free your team from those management constraints that limited the quality of their work – and their lives.

With this book you will:

• Understand and help to create the micro-culture required for your team to run fast, lean, and focused as they dive into the ambiguity of their innovation assignments.

• Use permission and resources to keep your team from getting "stuck". And if they do get stuck, be able to identify those moments and give the team what they need to get back on track quickly.

• Mentor your teams to successful outcomes with provocative questions through the design process, from idea validation and customer discovery to product prototyping and scaling.

 

Read Chapter 1: PDF Download

Book buyers will receive a special mentoring offer from the author after purchase

 

Why this Book?

Are you a leader struggling to steer your company toward innovation? A program manager seeking to inspire your teams? Or an intrapreneur hoping to catalyze growth? This book will equip you with the mindsets and tactics to unleash creativity within your organization.

Through insightful stories and practical frameworks, Enquire to Inspire will reveal the surprising power of questions over direction. You'll learn how to foster a culture of curiosity that drives rapid learnings through observation and experimentation. Build trust as you guide teams to fall in love with the problem, not the solution. Help them synthesize insights that illuminate opportunities for delivering real value to customers.

This book follows an insider’s journey from traditional manager to transformational mentor. Walk in the shoes of sponsors who clear obstacles, provide air cover, and advocate for teams within complex corporate systems. Avoid common pitfalls as you transition projects from discovery to scale. See how great coaches and mentors accelerate outcomes.

Enquire to Inspire will help you to reignite your team’s passion for customer-focused innovation. It would make an excellent selection for your next book club, management offsite, or mentor training. The conversational style makes it accessible to readers of all backgrounds. You'll finish the book re-energized, reflecting on your own leadership journey, and ready to start a movement that learns through questioning.

If you want better solutions, forget all the answers. Enquire to inspire!

 

Detailed Book Synopsis

Our story opens on a team of passionate knowledge workers, toiling away on projects that lack meaning. Their spirits crushed after years of building solutions without true understanding. Suddenly, a mentor arrives to lead them on a journey of discovery.

Armed with questions instead of answers, this sponsor helps the team fall in love with the problem, not the solution. They observe customers in the wild to uncover insights about motivations and needs. Failures provide valuable lessons as they test assumptions through rapid experiments. Surprises reveal they are on the right track.

The team synthesizes learnings into an evolving understanding of the customer and their struggle. They recommend next steps based on real evidence, not biases. As the solution takes shape, new challenges emerge around feasibility and integration.

With care, new players are onboarded, responsibilities transitioned. Our team struggles to find closure as their creation leaves the nest. But their patron reminds them of all they've accomplished. Their passions are reignited for the next adventure.

In the end, the mentor realizes it is not answers, but the right questions that empower people to find their own solutions. Mastery is never finished, there are always new perspectives. By lifting up others, we rise together.

Chapter 1: The book introduces the concept of mentoring innovation teams through asking questions rather than providing answers. The author explains his passion for helping teams embrace ambiguity and drive customer value. He describes the transformational impact of good mentors who build trust.

Chapter 2: This chapter advocates for bringing in an experienced coach to support the team's methods and the sponsor's transition to mentor. It discusses common problems teams face without a coach. Coaches accelerate learning, focus teams, and help optimize team and sponsor interactions.

Chapter 3: Effective sponsors assemble cross-functional teams, establish environments of trust and psychological safety, help set team scope and direction, provide resources, and advocate for the team. They mentor through enquiry, not advocacy. Sponsors support the team's development and mediate conflicts.

Chapter 4: Asking "how do you know?" prompts teams to validate assumptions and learn deeply about customers through observation and experiments. Insights fuel prototypes to test value delivery. Failures provide learning. Surprises indicate the team is doing something right.

Chapter 5: Sponsors help teams derive meaning from data through actionable insights. Experiments test risky assumptions about customer behaviors. Teams refine their value proposition and recommend next steps based on evidence.

Chapter 6: Consider viability, integrate new resources carefully, understand assumptions around scaling, and plan for transition of ownership. Help the team handle the emotions around project conclusion.

Chapter 7: Keep effective teams together. Reflect on what worked well and have frank discussions about improvements. Publicly recognize team accomplishments. Understand motivations as you identify the next challenge.

Chapter 8: Find a mentor, mentor someone else, involve your team in your learning journey. Ask good questions. Help people unlock their potential. Stay passionate about driving customer value.

Appendices:

Team Interaction Planning: This provides a 3-step guide for sponsors to plan interactions with the team - connect with the coach ahead of time to understand current status, meet with the team and coach to ask focused questions based on that understanding, then follow up with the coach to get feedback on how the interaction went.

Suggested Reading: A list of books and online resources related to innovation, design thinking, lean startup, agile, customer insight, and team development. Each has a brief note on its relevance.

Book buyers will receive a special mentoring offer from the author after purchase

 

About the Author

Bill Murray is an evangelist, bent on democratizing the mindsets and toolsets of innovation. He has coached customer discovery and product design teams at companies and startups of all sizes and from every populated continent. Along the way, he learned that teams thrived when their sponsor served as a mentor, not a manager. These mentors excel in leading their teams by providing the right permissions and resources at the right time.

Cobbling together his experiences, the wisdom of his fellow coaches, and his favorite startup gurus, he wrote this book to extoll the transformational partnership of a great team and a great leader. 

Proceeds from this book will help build a trust fund for Bill’s disabled son to ensure that he is able to live in safety and receive professional care after Bill and his wife are no longer physically able to care for him.

Website: CoachingUP • LinkedIn: Bill Murray

For personal or media inquiries or for non-US orders, please contact: coach@coachingup.us.

Enquire to Inspire: 20 Questions to Mentor Your Innovation Team to Success 

© 2023, Bill Murray

 

Why I am creating this

Years ago, I was suffering the fate of many project workers in the corporate world: I was unfulfilled, never saw the fruits of my labors, and was miserable. It affected my mental and physical health and my relationships with my family. But one day, I discovered a new way of working that changed everything. I was able to iteratively solve problems by getting radically close to the people that were experiencing the problem. And in that moment I vowed to never go back. I was able to see the impact of my work, I was helping people, and every day brought new challenges to solve customer problems. It all came down to having all the right questions, not all the right answers. Since that day, I've dedicated my life to bringing this way of working to as many people as possible. Key to spreading the word is building great sponsor-leaders to mentor teams of people taking the risk of working this way. I wrote this book to help managers make their transition to mentors and find the love of work again for themselves and for their innovation project teams.

What you will love about it

Through its pages, I'll share personal stories and simple tools you can use to be successful in giving your team the resources and permission required to do the risky work of innovation and product design. I'll take you through the milestones that your teams will encounter, and for each I'll give you the questions to ask to keep your team running fast and lean. Through these questions, you'll change from a manager of resources to a mentor of teams pursuing the priceless data that will de-risk the company's most important decisions and blow the lid off what's possible.

What else you should know

I've been there, just like you-- and I'm here to help! I've been mentoring people for over 25 years, and have leveraged the power of questions in both sales and people management. When you truly care about people and show them how much, there's no limit to what they can achieve. Being a humble spectator as those I mentor transform into something greater than they ever thought they could ever achieve is my passion. For the book launch, I've added an opportunity for you to share a 15-minute mentoring session with the author. I've included options for this that do and do not include the book. In this session, you get to set the agenda (eform to fill out ahead of time) and experience in person the liberation of mentorship that the book extols.