Success Quote by Levi Strauss

"An expert knows all the answers - if you ask the right questions" is less a compliment to expertise than a warning label on it. Levi Strauss, a businessman who built an empire by reading demand as much as by selling denim, frames knowledge as something activated by the asker, not hoarded by the so-called authority. The line flatters experts while quietly relocating power to the person doing the interrogating: the quality of insight depends on the quality of inquiry.

That business sensibility matters. In commerce, the wrong question kills you: Are people buying? Why here? What breaks at scale? Strauss is pointing to a practical truth about competence: mastery isn’t a magic vending machine of facts; it’s pattern recognition under pressure. Experts don’t carry “all the answers” in their pocket. They carry models - and the right question is the key that unlocks which model applies.

The subtext also takes a swipe at how we perform expertise. If an expert can only sound smart when the audience prompts them correctly, maybe expertise is partly theater: a collaborative act between speaker and listener. It’s a quiet rebuke to passive consumption of authority, and an argument for skepticism with manners. Don’t just ask for conclusions; interrogate assumptions, constraints, trade-offs.

In an age that treats experts as either saints or villains, Strauss offers a third role: the expert as a tool. Powerful, yes. Only as useful as the hand that knows how to use it.