The Most Creative Man in Silicon Valley

One way to get to the root of such personal stumbling blocks is to use one of the course's aforementioned tools: Ask penetrating questions. "I like to talk about the value of insight questions versus action questions," Ray says. "What I mean by 'action questions' are questions like 'What should I do?' or, even worse, 'What do you think I should do?' When you hear someone ask those kinds of questions, you know that person's not clear about the situation. There is, however, a series of questions that you can ask to get clear -- and once you're clear about the situation, you don't have to ask what to do."

Such 'insight' questions include "What is it that I don't yet understand?," "What is it that I'm really feeling?," and "What is it that I'm not seeing about the situation?" "Sometimes, when people think about these questions, they see that they are stuck in a situation because it gives them certain advantages," Ray says. "They may be miserable in a particular situation, but as long as they stay in it, they don't have to face certain issues. Once they realize that, they begin to see what's really going on."

Ray also recommends an exercise that asks questions that begin with "how come," instead of with "why." Explains Ray: " 'How come' is a little softer. 'Why' can be attacking." In this exercise, each question builds on the response to the previous question. Here's an example: How come you're always late for accounting class? Because I don't like accounting class. How come you don't like accounting class? Because I'm not doing well in it. How come you're not doing well in it? Because my father is an accountant, and I think he's a jerk. "Usually," says Ray, "when you get to the third or fourth level of a question, even if you start with something trivial, you end up with something fairly deep."

In what is perhaps the most distinctive part of the course, Ray's students abide by certain "live-withs" -- rules of thumb that students take from the classroom and apply to their lives. Live-withs vary from week to week, depending on which of the five challenges Ray is teaching in class at the time. For example, when the challenge of the week is "time and stress," the live-with that students are told to abide by is "Don't worry, just do it."

Besides combining the dicta of Bobby McFerrin and Nike, as Ray jokes, this live-with encourages students to simply do the work that they need to do, instead of being tormented by ßoating anxieties, and to record in their journals the results of their efforts. "One of the exercises that I suggest is to have a 'worry time,' " Ray says. "You can worry from, say, 5:30 to 6. And then, when a worry comes up at another time, you can notice it-you can even write it down-but you can't worry about it until your worry time. A lot of people find that when their worry time rolls around, they say, 'Why was I worried about these things?' "

Another live-with, assigned to coincide with the challenge "purpose and career," is "Do what is easy, effortless, and enjoyable." It's a live-with that has stood the test of time for Gary Marenzi, 44, a 1982 graduate of the Stanford Graduate School of Business. "I've really tried to follow it in my life," he says of the live-with. For one thing, it helped him decide on his post-mba career. "I think that a lot of students were saying, 'I just want to make a lot of money' or 'I want to do this because that's what the herd is doing,' " he says. "Then they'd go into jobs that they were ill-suited for, because they hadn't thought out what the ride would be like. In a way, doing what is easy, effortless, and enjoyable is basically a matter of following your heart. But it also asks how you're going to have fun along the way-whom you will interact with, where you will travel, what kind of environment you will be working in. It allows you to focus on the journey as well as on the end result."

For Marenzi, focusing on the journey led him to a career in Hollywood, where he is now president of international television at Paramount Pictures. "I realized that I had a passion for television, for the motion-picture industry, and that I didn't want to work with a boring product," he says. "I'd much rather make less money and be around a product in a stimulating environment. I got into the international side of the business because of the lifestyle that it affords-the travel and the contact with people overseas. Would I have gotten here without Mike's class? Yeah, maybe. But I certainly think that in the boiling cauldron of my second year of business school, when I was trying to make hard-and-fast decisions about what my life was going to be like, the class was a place of peace and serenity. It allowed me to think about what was going on around me and to decide whether it was for me."