Leadership: When gut calls are OK
In the “shift-age” it’s not the largest or best , but the fastest that will survive and prosper. To be fast you must personally have, or have access to, people who see emerging patterns (who instinctively focus on forests, not trees). Studies indicate that females generally score higher than their male counterparts when it comes to pattern recognition. If your gut usually gets it right, you probably have a pattern recognition talent. According to The Center for Sales Strategy (CSS), talent is what God puts in that comes out naturally–skill is what people add. Skill applied to talent will produce 10 times the typical result.
Today’s winning CEOs are not afraid to act on gut calls. They minimize the downside risk by quickly verifying assumptions. This is accomplished by replacing industrial-age dependances on knowledge and experience with the shift-age alternative of relying on processes to find out and take action…faster than the competition.
Paul Levesque (an Achieve colleague) and I were facilitating a think tank session with the Beefeater Restaurant chain in the UK, when their senior team acting on a hunch verified that the company’s sales goal–assumed unattainable by everybody except the managing director–could be met if every server added just one extra item to every order. A motivating campaign was quickly launched (including an incentive for each shift that met the target of adding 1 extra item per order) . The Managing Director’s gut call was “we can do this”. Process-discipline allowed his senior team to find out (verify his hunch) and take action faster than the competition. They met the “unattainable” goal, peramanently changed the Beefeater culture (their collective habits) and added significantly to tthe company’s market share.
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