Hartford Business Journal

www.HartfordBusiness.com May 22, 2017 • Hartford Business Journal 21 BIZ BOOKS Leveraging intuition to make smarter business decisions "P ut Your Intuition to Work — How to Supercharge Your Inner Wisdom to Think Fast and Make Great Decisions" by Lynn A. Robinson (Career Press, $15.99). While data and facts lead decision-mak- ing criteria, in many situations (especially in smaller firms) there often isn't sufficient information to make time-sensitive decisions. Also, facts and data can't take into account "softer factors" like person- alities and corporate cul- tures. Other times, you look at the information and you can't shake the feeling that it's "off." When these instanc- es arise, your intuition plays a major role in the decision. Honing your intuitive pro- cess, just like developing any other skill, takes practice. Key among Robinson's intuition- development exercises is an "intuition journal." At the begin- ning of each workday, write down your concerns, issues and chal- lenges for the day. Use a separate page for each. Prioritize each page and begin writing down the answers to questions like: "What aren't the facts and data telling me?" "What more should I know about … ?" "Where can I find … ?" Write down or draw whatever comes to mind. As each "page" comes up for discussion during the day, use your journal's informa- tion to frame your view of the situation; you can add the perspectives of others to your journal page as dialogue unfolds. Use this broader picture of the "page" to think about answers, as well as other questions. The journal also provides a place for the "what if" ideas that randomly pop into your head. You'll find that writing them down increases the amount of such ideas because "what if" becomes part of your routine when looking at situations. Look at your "what if" page frequently; you'll find that what you've written has rel- evance at a future date. The bottom line comes from a Justin Timberlake song: "I got this feeling inside my bones. It goes electric, wavy when I turn it on." Once it's turned on, inner wisdom and intuitive focus grow. • • • "Achieving Longevity — How Great Firms Prosper through Entrepreneur- ial Thinking" by Jim Dewald (Univer- sity of Toronto Press, $32.95). When an organization focuses on becoming efficient, management often over- looks the price paid for being too lean. That price involves the loss of resources (espe- cially intellectual capital), which results in its inability to: 1. deliver something other than "one-size-fits-all" products/services, and 2. adapt to change. Such a narrow focus all but eliminates the innovation needed to grow. Dewald points out that large organiza- tions have in place (e.g. infrastructure, money, established brand, brainpower, dis- tribution channels, customers, etc.) that would make any entrepreneur do a happy dance. To grow, an organization needs to develop a culture that allows employees to constantly use the resources they have at hand to explore doing things differently and doing different things. By giving employees free rein to think about "what's next," an organization really creates new value opportu- nities. Not all will pan out; the bummers still provide internal value because they are learning experiences. His research found a cyclical model in firms whose longevity involved adapting to changing technology, markets, and the shift to global- ization. The model has three "wash, rinse and repeat" cycles: 1. strategic exploitation of the current environment, 2. using internal entre- preneurship to fuel exploratory investigation of new markets, and 3. strategic exploitation of those new markets. Examples: 3M (1902) start- ed as a mining company; GE (1892) started as a manufacturer of light bulbs; Avon (1886) went from selling books to providing an array of personal products. Key takeaway: "The only sustainable competitive advantage is an organization's ability to learn faster than the competition." — Peter M. Senge. Learning involves mov- ing into new markets. n Jim Pawlak is a nationally syndicated book reviewer. Jim Pawlak COMMUNITY CONNECTIONS Tough times call for innovative, fearless leaders By Doe Hentschel W hen times are tough, we play it safe. When the world feels unsafe, unpre- dictable or unhealthy, it's human nature to go home, close the door, pull down the shades and pull the covers over our heads. We find security in familiarity and want to pro- tect what we feel is essential. We forego what we consider unnecessary; this is not the time for experimentation, risk taking or frivolity. The paradox is that in our search for safety, we iso- late ourselves, lose touch with the world and risk being unpre- pared and irrelevant when we cautiously open the door to see if everything is okay. Organizations do the same thing. While it may seem rational to scale back, focus on the tried and true, embrace austerity and postpone innova- tion, the organization that survives may be incompatible with the needs of the changing world. And while leaders desperately hold on, waiting for the chaos to calm, they ask their workforce to trust in a future even they cannot describe, to do more with less, and to smile and be nice while doing it. It may be counter-intuitive, but I suggest that tough times are precisely when we should reexamine our organization's fundamental core, imagine new ways to contribute to an evolving world, take some calculated risks to transform what we do and how we do it, invest in enhancing the capacity of our workforce, and find ways to celebrate and even play a bit. Question our fundamental core, you ask? All organizations have a foundational purpose, their reason for being. How could that change? How indeed? The telephone company is now the telecommunications conglomerate; the neighborhood school is now the community learning center; the automobile manufacturer is now a transportation company; the hospital is now the heart of the healthcare system. As leaders we must be open to exploring our organization's role in a dynamic world and whether or not that role requires modi- fication in line with the world's needs. Are the needs we once met still relevant? Are there new needs that create opportunities to apply our knowledge, skills and services in new ways? Is what we have always done still needed and valued? Will it be in the future? Chances are the answers to these ques- tions will demand that we become change leaders, able to inspire others and help them understand how to address emerging needs in ways that are consistent with our tradition but transformed for the future. We must learn how to engage everyone in the organization in this work. We need them to find new solutions to new problems; and we need to learn how to open vertical, horizontal and diagonal communication channels to replace outdated organizational charts so that they can. We need new ways to lead that support and encourage everyone to contribute their ideas, their skills and their energy to our work. The forward-thinking leaders at a state agency in Connecticut realized that as resourc- es become scarcer, they needed to do all these things in order to achieve their goals. By mak- ing leadership training available to all staff, nearly 30 percent of whom have now partici- pated, this agency has increased its workforce's competence, agility and engagement. No one I know comes to work in the morning eagerly looking for tasks they will do poorly. No one I know wants to screw up. Rather, when offered the opportunity to develop new skills and master new knowl- edge, most people are motivated to come out from under the covers, open the door and be part of the exciting challenges taking place. Times are tough today. Rather than play- ing it safe, let's give everyone in our organi- zation the tools they need to help define and shape our future, discover how we can do things differently and develop our capacity to creatively take on challenges. If we do, we will have lots to celebrate. n Doe Hentschel is the vice president of Lead- ership Greater Hartford. Doe Hentschel ▶ ▶ While data and facts lead decision-making criteria, in many situations (especially in smaller firms) there often isn't sufficient information to make time-sensitive decisions. ▶ ▶ Tough times are precisely when we should reexamine our organization's fundamental core, imagine new ways to contribute to an evolving world, take some calculated risks to transform what we do, invest in enhancing the capacity of our workforce, and find ways to celebrate and even play.

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