Strategic Intuition: The Creative Spark In Human Achievement;
By William Duggan; HarperCollins;
Pages: 195; Price: Rs 395
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Somewhere in the book, the author of Strategic Intuition, William Duggan describes how Michael Porter (the man to whose work most modern business strategists looks up to) helps you to gain a deep understanding of a business and its environment but does not tell you what to do when confronted with a strategic decision.
To make such a bold claim requires solid conviction and perspective beyond just modern business. The author comes equipped with both and backs his theory of strategic intuition with a wide range of examples.
Duggan starts off by describing strategy itself as a mongrel field with no pure pedigree in any of the academic disciplines. He then describes three kinds of intuition — ordinary, expert and strategic. Ordinary Instinct is what we call gut feeling/instinct while expert intuition was what was used to describe snap decision making by Malcolm Gladwell in his bestseller Blink.
Strategic Intuition is what is needed to find your direction in new situations. In one of the several illustrations dotting the book, the author also argues why expert intuition is of little use in new situations distinguishing how firefighters would use expert intuition to fight a fire but why and how they would need to use strategic intuition to decide which ones to fight.
The book is divided into two sections. The first shows flashes of intuition work in theory using history of science, neuroscience, cognitive psychology and Asian philosophies for its foundation. In the second section, the author uses examples from business, social enterprises, professions and education which show the application of strategic intuition in practice.
The author cites Thomas Kuhn, Clausewitz and Schumpeter along with Asian philosophies as primary inspirations. He discusses how Kuhn’s work The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions documents how scientific progress is made across ages by men such as Copernicus who built on ideas which had been independently proposed before, but never orchestrated together to provide a coherent picture.
From science, the author then moves to military warfare where he contrasts Clausewitz’s decisive theories which don’t start with an end objective, with those of Jomini (who served with Napoleon). Jomini’s theories are the precursor to the modern process of objective oriented strategic planning where a business moves from a current state A to a target state B. While the author isn’t altogether dismissive of this process, he provides the examples in modern business of IBM, Apple, Microsoft and Google.
Apart from these well known business legends, the author seeks to put a new spin on themes as diverse as Grameen Bank, the American Civil Rights movement and the struggle for women’s franchise in the US and Picasso’s art. He then proceeds to dissect existing techniques for creative thinking starting with De Bono’s thinking hats and Howard Gardener’s intelligences. Along the way, he does puncture the halos built around the Horatio Alger myth as well as positive thinking propounded by gurus such as Peale, Hill and Robbins.
He also critically examines modern education techniques for kids to business school graduates, ranging from the Dewey system to the much vaunted case methodology which began at Harvard and commenting on why our thinking process is conditioned by our education system. Perhaps that is why some of our celebrated and successful businessmen are dropouts. The author also cites three tools which aid the development of strategic intuition — GE’s What Works matrix, reverse brainstorming and Betty Edwards’ Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, offering some practical alternatives to most existing techniques which he criticises uninhibitedly.
While the book has a few irritating editing shortfalls including a reference to Mara, the demon who tormented Buddha on his quest for enlightenment as a god of evil as well as a few typos, it is still worth a read for its courageous effort at providing a fresh and challenging alternative to conventional strategic thinking, itself a difficult matter.
It could have done away with the chapter on Warrior Buddha considering the superficial and almost contrived treatment of the topic. Perhaps the author’s admission that not a single idea or example in his book is his own, but that the combination is new is a self referential tribute to his book. The book is subtitled “How the Aha! Moment really happens” but this reviewer’s response to the book is closer to “Hmm...”
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