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Strategic Intuition: The Creative Spark in Human Achievement Page 8 (22 of 208)
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8
Strategic Intuition
fl ash of insight come. Asian martial arts apply this discipline to
military strategy in a way we can recognize as strategic intuition.
Our next fi eld is business strategy. We tell the story of the
computer revolution in the same way that Kuhn told the story
of the scientifi c revolution. From Gates to Google, via IBM and
Apple, we trace each great achievement as strategic intuition in
action. We then look to the reigning models of business strategy
to see what they say about the same subject. Sure enough, they
leave out how strategists actually come up with their ideas. For
that we must go back to Joseph Schumpeter, an economist of the
1940s who explained leaps in business achievement in terms we
now recognize as strategic intuition. We fi nd a way to reconcile
Schumpeter’s work with modern models of strategy, including
Porter and fi nancial models that planners use to project a strategy
into the future.
Our next fi eld is social enterprise. This is a new name for an
old idea: applying elements of management science to govern-
ment and nonprofi t agencies. Strategy is one of those elements,
for every organization needs a strategy. Here we tell the story of
three great social movements—civil rights in the United States,
how American women won the right to vote, and microfi nance
in poor countries—as strategic intuition in action again. We then
see how strategic intuition confl icts with reigning ideas of how
agencies think they should make their strategy. We also apply a
tool from the business world—the insight matrix from General
Electric—to show how to use strategic intuition as a standard
procedure in any organization. This cuts against a recent trend
toward rigorous post-program evaluations that claim to apply the
scientifi c method to social problems. As Kuhn shows us, the real
scientifi c method works by strategic intuition.
Next come the professions. Chief among them are law and
medicine, but any practical education or experience makes
you a member of a professional fi eld: engineering, journalism,
social work, international development, information technology,
media—the list goes on and on. In most professions you don’t
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