EXECUTIVES TRUST THEIR INTUITION
“Gut reaction is essential to any decision-making process”
Scott Beth, VP of Finance Operations, Intuit
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Ignoring gut instinct could make your projects go belly-up
Researcher Chantal Burns interviewed 600 employees and found that “ …three out of four times your hunch will pay off, and that will save time, resources – and, ultimately, benefit the bottom line.”
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Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald’s, explained why he purchased the McDonald brand from the McDonald brothers: “I’m not a gambler and I didn’t have that kind of money, but my funny bone instinct kept urging me on”.
(Miller, C., & Ireland, D. H. 2005. Intuition in strategic decision making: Friend or foe in the fast-paced 21st century? Academy of Management Executive, 19, 19-30.)
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Chairman and CEO Kip Tindell, of The Container Store, is a firm believer in the power of intuition, and the absolute necessity of knowledge and experience to make that intuition possible. Container Store employees use their intuition to divine what a customer’s true needs are, to gauge whether or not a candidate is the right hire, and to channel their creativity to come up with interesting solutions to problems.
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Warren Bennis, author of On Becoming a Leader states: “American organizational life is a left-brain culture, meaning logical, analytical, technical, controlled, conservative, and administrative. We, to the extent we are its products, are dominated and shaped by those same characteristics. Our culture needs more right-brain qualities, needs to be more intuitive, conceptual, synthesizing and artistic.”
