This week is a no travel week so I am using the time to catch up with my VC friends to see what they are up to. I was talking to Rick Segal (JLA Ventures) today about the state of investments in the current market. On the topic of finding/funding the right people, we both agreed that while it is easy to transfer the intellectual capital of a start-up idea to a new hire, it is extremely difficult to transfer the emotional capital so the person with the expecation that he or she will run the start-up with the same level of passion and commitment.
Passion, commitment often comes with intuition. In the crazy world of never-ending unknowns, human-intuition can prove to be very useful as a reliable alternative to painstaking fact gathering and analysis, because there are not facts. Great start-up manager often rely on their instincts than on facts and figures in running their businesses.
Let me explain why. The best story comes from classic of military strategy (as a business strategist for 20 years, I can tell you all stories from Carl to Mao). The word “strategy” entered the English language in around 1810, when Napoleon’s success as a battlefield general made him emperor of Europe. His enemies started studying how he did it so they could learn it too and defeat him. Clausewitz’s account of Napoleon’s strategy matches amazingly well what modern neuroscience tells us about flashes of insight. For those who have no idea of who Clausewitz (1780–1831) . He was a Prussian general and military strategist hevilily influenced by the Napoleonic wars in which he fought.
Clausewitz had a four steps approach. First, you take in “examples from history” throughout your life and put them on the shelves of your brain. Study can help, by putting more there. Second comes “presence of mind,” where you free your brain of all preconceptions about what problem you’re solving and what solution might work. Third comes the flash of insight itself. Clausewitz called it coup d’oeil (which is French for “glance”). In a flash, a new combination of examples from history fly off the shelves of your brain and connect in that split second. Fourth comes “resolution,” or determination, where you not only say to yourself “I know what? I have an idea"!
The most difficult one is the third step “presence of mind”, when you need a sense of what’s the best strategic option, you will need to put away your analytical mind for a few seconds, clear your mind from false paths and let your intuition go to work. At best, an intuitive leap can create a breakthrough. "When you're entering an area where the unknowns are high, and experience is important, if you don't rely on intuition you're cutting yourself short," according to Howard Gardner (a professor of cognition and education at Harvard).
According to Einstein, "There are no logical path to these laws. Only intuition resting on sympathetic understanding of experience can reach them."
