Abstract:
This article focuses on the art of management, which lies in the ability to make decisions in the face of incomplete information. Effective managers of innovation use the minimum amount of information needed for a reasonable and timely decision. If one waits for all the data to straggle in, the competitors will beat to the market in no time. One's quick judgment, intuition, and experience often override the need for data-hoarding and exhaustive analysis. A survey of over 2,000 top executives shows that they rely more on intuition than they admit. They don't admit it because intuition, being so subjective, is often mistrusted or negatively perceived as a decision-making strategy. Many of society's leaps forward would not have occurred, or would have taken a lot longer to occur, if pioneering leaders hadn't had the vision and will to forge ahead on the basis of their intuition rather than on purely factual information.
