While doing research for my next book I came a cross an interesting statistic: When making important decisions, 65% of the top CEOs of Publicly Traded Companies go with their INTUITION!!!
If you are into statistics or a shareholder of one of the companies, or a risk assessment manager this finding should make the gears in your head grind a little. But in reality we have gotten so risk averse, many companies are afraid to take a chance because the data says they will fail.
This is where small businesses and entrepreneurs
can make a big impact!
An expert from my book Liquid Leadership: From Woodstock to Wikipedia…Learn As You Go, page 193,
“Most people haven’t ever experienced hyper-growth of more than 425 percent, but while at K2, my staff grew from two full-time employees to sixty in less than three years, while revenues exploded accordingly. To stay ahead of competing Web developers, I had to absorb as much information as was physically possible, then take action despite not being able to see the bigger picture. Why? Because if I waited for each and every little piece of data before I made my move, I could literally be the last company at the table.
To stay in the leadership position, I had to learn to do something I had never been trained to do: take action before I had all the facts. I learned to leap before I looked, trusting that the bridge would appear. It was like climbing a mountain on a foggy day when you can only see fifteen feet ahead at any given time. How do you navigate through that? Take a few steps forward until you see the next few steps. Readjust, then take a few more. Do this over and over again.
In the past I would have analyzed the market I was entering over and over again to make sure there was real money there. Then I would take action. But in this Information Age paradigm, I had to realize that I needed to take action with only four of the seven pieces of data, and trust that the rest would be there farther down the road. In other words, I had to react to basic market trends with creativity and intuition rather than research.
Each time I got more information, I adjusted my strategy. What really helped was that my business partners did the same, and we were surrounded by some of the smartest people around, from seasoned businesspeople and MIT MBAs to tech-heads and Wharton grads.
It isn’t really a new concept. Adjusting your strategies as you go is actually a dynamic familiar to battlefield soldiers, firefighters, and video gamers—something Gen Y and Gen X are quite comfortable doing.
Action gets results; stopping to think about it does not.
Adjusting to new data requires a mixture of intuition and logic, like driving through dense fog—best to do it twenty feet at a time, readjusting every thirty feet or so. Follow the GPS, but use your eyes as well. All the information says there should be a bridge up ahead, so you act accordingly. If you get to the chasm and the bridge isn’t there, look around. It may be farther down. If no bridge appears, then either build one or hire a company that can build it. If they work out, buy the bridge builders.
Spartan and Speedy
As companies lay off more and more people, the corporation will start to change organically. Where there was once a thick layer of middle managers, the company of the future may have no such thing. Executives may find themselves sitting outside the bullpen. As each employee begins to take on more and more leadership roles within an organization, the number of people required to manage self-starters will begin to shrink.
When you shrink the distance between executives, managers, and producers, the time from idea to execution will shrink as well. Communication will be less discombobulated because the information won’t have that far to travel. Think in terms of the telephone game: With fewer players involved, the amount of miscommunication will shrink, allowing smaller organizations to move faster. Speed, efficiency, disruption, and action are the hallmark of a twenty-first-century company.
The layers of communication found in large organizations will become a liability, as small companies take over the leadership position in a type of corporate guerrilla war.
Speed is the advantage of the smaller company.
And regardless of size, companies that are swift have almost no communication barriers between CEO, management, and staffers.
By eliminating the walls between you and the bright ideas, you’ll be able to adapt your strategy to reflect new input. But no matter what, keep moving. Your survival depends on it.
Through your actions you’ll start to see a strategy. Sit with your executive committee, and make this new ideology a reality. At the end of the road you will know what to do, but not before then. Take on the tactic of a warrior, and adapt to the landscape.”
Try using your intuition next time...lather, rinse and repeat.
Thank you for reading,
Brad Szollose
PS: I want to thank everyone who sent your well wishes during my father’s passing. Your support has been so greatly appreciated. Thank you as well to my colleague’s here at A Captured Mind who reached out in text, cards and phone calls. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
But this is not based on management theory:
Brad is a former C-Level Internet executive who went from entrepreneur to IPO in 3 yrs – co-founding K2 Design, the very first Dot Com Agency to go public on NASDAQ. His Results Only management model was applied to the first wave of Gen Y workers producing great results– 425% profitable growth for 5 straight years and winning K2 the Arthur Andersen NY Enterprise Award for Best Practices in Fostering Innovation among his employees!
Today, through his workshops and keynotes, Brad helps Fortune 500 Companies close the Digital Divide by understanding it as a cultural divide—created by a new tech-savvy worker...and customer.
Mr. Szollose also writes a monthly column on business and marketing techniques that reach Generation Y for A Captured Mind newsletter and is part of The Mind Capture Group faculty.
* 2011 Axiom Business Book silver medal winner in the leadership
* #1 Amazon Best-Selling Author
