Saturday 3 September 2011

THE POWER INSTINCT!

Albert Einstein once said, “The only real valuable thing is intuition,” and the society that honours the servant [the rational mind] has forgotten the gift [the intuitive mind]. This is aptly applicable to today’s business world as well! With business decisions becoming more complex, corporate executives are more and more relying on gigabytes of market research data in order to reach a decision. Gone are the days, when entrepreneurs and CEOs would keep everything at bay and put their foot down even against conventional thought-process. But there are people who have proven the skeptics wrong, like Bill Gates, who never went for an intensive market research before launching his first operating system. Business leaders like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Richard Branson rely more on their instinct for taking decisions. Once in an interview, Richard Branson said, “I do a lot by gut feeling and a lot by personal experience... if I relied on accountants to make decisions, most certainly I would have never gone into the airline business. I would not have gone into the space business...” Same goes for Bill Gates, Andrew Grove and many others who relied on their passion and gut feeling to materialize their vision.

In numerous cases, assumptions and researches have proved to be otherwise. The New Coke fiasco is a case in point. Herman Miller, the furniture manufacturer, decided to go with market research (that showed how executives want their office chairs to be senatorial or throne-like) and not on their past experiences and made office chairs that were slender with transparent concoction of black plastic (in short the ergonomics chairs) and eventually found very few buyers.

After all, gigabytes of number crunching can’t win over the experience an executive earns over the decades — and this is what forms the fundamental of his/her basic instinct aka the gut feeling.

Leadership is all about believing in oneself and not relying on numbers. And this magazine will present you the stories of those business leaders who defied the conventional research and traversed their own path. Along with all these names, I would like to add one more, our Editor-in-Chief, who in his book ‘Count Your Chickens Before They Hatch’ puts all this winning attitude in a pithy manner in just one line — "if you think you can, you’re right."

But before signing off, I would like to thank my editorial team who reached out to such business leaders to make this first issue of CYCBTH reflect our intent and thoughts in its true sense, the design team who gave it a world class look and the production team without whose tireless efforts this issue of CYCBTH wouldn’t have reached your table! Thanks to this wonderful team of CYCBTH, I can always count my chickens before they hatch!