Strategic Intuition, a profound book

I have read a fantastic book:Strategic Intuition. It is one of the most profound books I have ever read. It answers the question how do you get your strategic idea? That’s the question that Strategic Intuition answers.  This link is to a 5 page recap of the book, it is worth reading many times over         http://bit.ly/nathan-strategic

William Duggan, an associate professor of Management at Columbia Business School, is an expert on what he calls “strategic intuition.” Recently, his class on this subject was rated the highest by the students of Columbia of any of the 218 classes offered. Below is my e-mail interview with Mr. Duggan:

1. Why did you write Strategic Intuition?
   I wrote Strategic Intuition because I stumbled upon the idea and immediately thought it was interesting and important. In strategy, we have lots of techniques for analyzing your industry, your competitors, your own position, customer trends and the like — but none of those methods tells you how to conclude what strategy to adopt. And we have lots of techniques for planning, where you lay out the activities and milestones to accomplish your goal — but none of these methods tells you how to set a goal in the first place. There’s a missing link between strategic analysis and strategic planning: how do you get your strategic idea? That’s the question that strategic intuition answers. I haven’t seen any other answer, and I’ve done a thorough search.
2. In a nutshell, what is strategic intuition?
   Strategic intuition is the selective projection of past elements into the future in a new combination as a course of action that fits your previous goals or sparks new ones, with the personal commitment to follow through and work out the details along the way. It happens as a flash of insight when your mind is relaxed and connects the dots.
3. How does it work?
   Modern neuroscience has overturned the idea of two sides of the brain — creativity on one side, analysis on the other — in favor of “intelligent memory”, where the brain constantly searches for a useful synthesis of a subset of elements from the huge volume it takes in and stores. As it turns out, the first great work of strategy scholarship dates from 1832 — On War by Carl von Clausewitz — and puts the same idea at the center of strategic success. Von Clausewitz gives four steps: 1) examples from history, where you take in elements of what others have done before you to succeed; 2) presence of mind, where you enter the strategic situation with no expectations of what the goal, problem, solution, or strategy should be; 3) “coup d’oeil”, which means “glance” in French, where selective elements from examples from history come together in your mind as a flash of insight; and 4) resolution, which is the determination to carry through the idea you’ve just seen in your mind.

Here is an interesting web site about the book: http://columbiapress.typepad.com/strategic_intuition  

When I went to this web site I saw a link to How Andrew Wiles solved Fermat's theorem by combining the work of other mathematicians in a flash of insight. 

Andrew Wiles lived in our home in Sewanee when he was 19. His parents were friends of my folks. He is considered one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century. Andrew was the subject of a lecture by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker 2012 conference a few years ago. Here is a link to a web log entry I did on the subject.