Previous Page Next Page 
(c)  2025 Columbia University Press. All Rights reserved.

Strategic Intuition: The Creative Spark in Human Achievement resources

Extracted Text (may have errors)

7 Flash versus Blink charge, led Klein to understand how snap judgments combine past elements in the expert’s mind without any conscious thought. They just happen, from practice. Our study of expert intuition takes intelligent memory out of the neuroscience laboratory and into real life. This sets the stage for future chapters, where we see how strategic intuition applies the same mental mechanism as expert intuition, but more slowly, more consciously, and in new situations where past expertise is not enough. Expert intuition works for familiar situations—you get better and faster at your job. But strategic intuition works for the unfamiliar, where every strategic situation is different to some degree. Our next fi strategy eld is classical military strategy. The word entered the English language in 1810, when scholars fi rst turned the subject into a formal discipline of study. From there, strat- egy spread to business in the late nineteenth century and to other fi rst great work of strategy scholarship, elds in the twentieth. The fi von Clausewitz’s On War, put fl ashes of insight at the fore of how good generals think. Von Clausewitz gives us key elements that accompany a fl ash of insight: examples from history, which you must already have in mind; presence of mind, where you expect the unexpected and don’t prejudge which examples you will draw on; the fl ash of insight itself, which selects and combines the right examples; and resolution, where you follow through despite the uncertainties and obstacles ahead. These four elements solve the problem of how intelligent memory applies to unfamiliar situa- tions: the elements you draw on come from the past, but their combination is something new. From classical European military strategy we move to classical Asian military strategy. Half the world lives in countries where the leading ideas about thinking for action come not from American or European scientists and scholars but from the ancient tradi- tions of India and China. Elements of classical philosophy from these countries show a striking similarity to the four steps of von Clausewitz. These traditions pay special attention to presence of mind: the mental discipline of freeing your thoughts to let the 40962 Ch01 001-010 r1.indd 7 40962 Ch01 001-010 r1.indd 7 8/10/07 11:40:14 AM8/10/07 11:40:14 AM

Help

loading