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Strategic Intuition: The Creative Spark in Human Achievement resources

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x Preface and war might understand and accept. For this step I joined the faculty of Columbia Business School. There I found fellow schol- ars in economics, sociology, psychology, and political science dedicated to translating research insights into practical applica- tions for all kinds of management in business, government, and nonprofi t organizations. My own work fi t right in. Even more, this rich research environ- ment greatly expanded my horizon. Beyond Kuhn, Schumpeter, and von Clausewitz, I now found common ground in other domains as well, including neuroscience, psychology, business strategy, social enterprise, professional and artistic mastery, and even the self-help movement. It led me to a wider understanding of how to create useful ideas in any fi eld, not just my own. My early discoveries led to two preliminary statements of what I found.1 Armed with these publications, I set out to teach what I learned as a graduate university course. Hundreds of students later, I am much wiser for it. I found my students quite open to the ideas I offered them but very demanding too. For the most part they aim for careers as practitioners, not scholars, so they served as a vivid stand-in for the development experts I fi rst set out to inform. For them each idea has to have a practical impli- cation for their own actions. Students at business schools these days go on to an astonishing range of fi elds—banking, the arts, social services, diplomacy, and virtually anything else you can think of. This range forced me to try to present my discoveries in their clearest and most universal form, for all kinds of human achievement. The unifying idea of this book is a common mechanism at the heart of outstanding achievements in every domain of human endeavor. I call that mechanism “strategic intuition,” although it goes by several other names in the various fi elds where I found it. Behind every story of major advance is a turning point where someone has a useful idea that changes the fi eld or starts a new one. Strategic intuition explains what happens in the mind of whoever has that idea. For reasons I will discuss, you seldom read 40962 Ch00 FM i-xiv r4.indd x 40962 Ch00 FM i-xiv r4.indd x 8/10/07 12:00:23 PM8/10/07 12:00:23 PM

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