Enquire to Inspire

20 Questions to Mentor Your Innovation Team to Success

By Bill Murray

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Transform Your Leadership Through the Power of Questions

Stop managing people with answers and start mentoring them with questions. This book will free you from the burden of directive management for the satisfaction of mentoring through questions—and it will free your team from the constraints that limit the quality of their work and their lives.

"It's what you ask your team, not what you tell them that drives amazing outcomes."

My concise 106-page book will teach you how to:

  • Understand and help create the micro-culture required for your team to run fast, lean, and focused as they navigate ambiguity
  • Use permission and resources to keep your team from getting "stuck"—and identify those moments to get them back on track quickly
  • Mentor your teams to successful outcomes with provocative questions through every stage of the design process
Enquire to Inspire Book
Author's son

A Personal Note

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

By purchasing this book, you're not only investing in your leadership journey but also contributing to this important cause.

What You'll Discover Inside

Practical insights and actionable strategies to transform your leadership approach

Master the Art of Team Sponsorship

Learn how to assemble the right cross-functional team, establish environments of trust and psychological safety, help set team scope and direction, provide resources, and advocate for your team. You'll discover how to mentor through enquiry, not advocacy.

Unlock Customer-Driven Innovation

Discover how to ask "How do you know?" to prompt teams to validate assumptions and learn deeply about customers through observation and experiments. See how insights fuel prototypes to test value delivery, and how even "failures" provide valuable learning.

Transform from Manager to Mentor

Break free from traditional management approaches that limit people's potential. Learn how to use provocative questions that expand your team's thinking while maintaining focus, helping them move quickly toward customer-driven outcomes.

Navigate the Full Innovation Journey

The book guides you through each phase of innovation work—from team formation to scaling solutions to transitioning ownership—with practical questions to ask at each step. Real stories of success and failure bring these concepts to life.

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Book Front Cover
front Book Back Cover
back Book Contents
contents

What Leaders Are Saying

Insights from professionals who have applied these principles

"Innovation, like strategy, is the search for new competitive advantages. All advantages fade over time as competitors adapt, so innovation is critical to any strategically healthy company. What you hold in your hands is a powerful tool. This tool was forged by Bill over years in the furnace of experience."
— Sam Geraci
former Fortune 500 VP of Enterprise Strategy

Book Overview

A Journey Through Innovation Leadership

This concise 106-page guide is designed for busy leaders who want to transform their approach to team mentorship:

 

Chapter 1: Why this book? A love story about people finding passion in their work
Chapter 2: Why partner with a coach? The value of bringing an experienced coach
Chapter 3: What is a sponsor? Building trust, providing resources, and enabling teams
Chapter 4: How do you know? Validating assumptions and learning about customers
Chapter 5: What does it mean? Driving meaning from data through actionable insights
Chapter 6: Where do we go from here? Scaling solutions and integrating resources
Chapter 7: What do we do for an encore? Keeping effective teams together
Chapter 8: How do I put it into action? Practical steps to implement what you've learned
Plus: valuable appendices Team Interaction Planning guides and a curated reading list to continue your growth
Read sample "Chapter 1: Why this book?" (PDF download)

About the Author

Bill Murray

Bill Murray

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.

Transform Your Leadership Today

Stop managing people with answers and start mentoring them with questions that drive true innovation.

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