Intuitive Decision Making

Kurt Matzler, Franz Bailom and Todd A. Mooradian:

Should executives make decisions based on what their “gut” tells them? Lately that idea has lost some favor, as technology’s ability to accumulate and analyze data has rapidly increased — supplanting, according to some accounts, the high-level manager’s need to draw heavily on intuition. But intuition needs some rescuing from its detractors, and the place to start is by clarifying what it really is, and how it should be developed.
Intuition is not a magical sixth sense or a paranormal process; nor does it signify the opposite of reason or random and whimsical decision making. Rather, intuition is a highly complex and highly developed form of reasoning that is based on years of experience and learning, and on facts, patterns, concepts, procedures and abstractions stored in one’s head.
In this article, the authors draw on examples from the worlds of chess, neuroscience and business — especially Austria’s KTM Sportmotorcycle AG — to show that intuitive decision making should not be prematurely buried. They point out that although the study of intuition has not been extensively explored as a part of management science, studies reveal that several ingredients are critical to intuition’s development: years of domain-specific experience; the cultivation of personal and professional networks; the development of emotional intelligence; a tolerance for mistakes; a healthy sense of curiosity; and a sense of intuition’s limits.

15 places to visit to see the real California

LA Times:

1. A Salinas storyteller’s tale
NATIONAL STEINBECK CENTER
Salinas, Monterey County
It is always a challenge to commemorate a life, never mind a writer’s life. Unlike museums devoted to sports legends or war heroes, a museum that honors a man of arts and letters must reflect his quiet, solitary pursuit. Which is to say that such a repository may be unbearably dull. How delightful, then, is the National Steinbeck Center at the end of Salinas’ Main Street, a place whose undercurrents deliver shock after tiny shock — here an arc of unknown history, there a jolt of social commentary. The museum is just a couple of blocks from where townspeople burned Steinbeck’s books, enraged at his perceived betrayal of them and agriculture, the economic star then and now ($3.5 billion worth of crops in 2006) of Monterey County’s show. Never mind that he was a hometown boy — you can see his Victorian birthplace just up the street from the museum and have lunch there — he was Judas to the growers and landowners portrayed unsympathetically in “Grapes of Wrath” and “East of Eden.” The modern-looking center may seem incongruous with the unpretentious persona of the author, whose work won Pulitzer and Nobel prizes. But like his books, it shines a light on the issues, using film clips and displays that are muted set pieces, occasionally somber but never dull. To see this place and the fields that surround Salinas is to understand that Steinbeck’s so-called Valley of the World is really the Heart of California.