Acknowledgments

This book has been in the making for several years. Humble Inquiry as a concept was part of my helping book, but it was Jeevan Sivasubramaniam who saw immediately that this should be a book of its own. I resisted for a while but now thank him heartily for his persistent efforts to get me to do the project. I tried many versions on my colleagues at MIT and my consulting friends and am very grateful to all of them for giving me both encouragement and feedback. Among them, the most helpful were Daniel Asnes, Karen Ayas, Lotte Bailyn, David Coughlan, Tina Doerffer, Jody Gittell, Tom Huber, Mary Jane Kornacki, Bob McKersie, Philip Mix, Joichi Ogawa, Jack Silversin, Emily Sper, John Van Maanen, Ilene Wasserman, and the Berrett-Kohler reviewers who provided detailed comments and suggestions.

Concepts and ideas grow out of experience, so I have to give thanks to the many friends, clients, and strangers who exhibited both the good side of how to humbly inquire and the bad side of telling me things at the wrong times or when I was not ready to hear them. I appreciate and learned from both the good and bad.

I want to thank my kids for their encouragement and support as I continued to work and write even as my circumstances would have permitted me to just take it easy and smell the flowers. Finally, I want to thank my new lady friend Claude Madden who for the last year has lived with my ups and downs as I was trying to finally shape what Humble Inquiry was to be. She was a consistent source of encouragement and support.

Palo Alto, CA
June 2013