What's interesting about these questions is the ratio of how important they are to how often you think about them. Every company probably could and sh...
Paul Graham highlights that the most important questions for a company are often those rarely asked, and suggests every company should create its own version of this exercise, with Luca Dellanna recommending it as a quarterly practice.
Background
- Paul Graham is a renowned Silicon Valley investor, co-founder of the startup accelerator Y Combinator, and author of influential essays on startups and technology.
- Luca Dellanna is a writer and consultant focused on operational excellence, risk management, and business behavior.
- The image referenced shows Dellanna's proposed "quarterly exercise": a set of deceptively simple but high-impact questions (e.g., about bottlenecks, customer defection, team morale) that most leaders rarely stop to ask.
- Graham's point — that the most important questions are the least frequently asked — reflects a classic startup insight: immediate operational firefighting crowds out reflection on structural problems, which is exactly what kills companies. The "ratio" he mentions is between a question's true importance and how seldom it actually gets considered.