When All Else Fails, Follow a Hunch

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Saj-nicole Joni for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.

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Have you ever noticed how, against all odds, someone, somewhere, manages to discover a solution to an insoluble problem through sheer intuition?

I’m thinking about this because my house nearly burned down about 5 months ago. We managed to escape with our lives and to save two of our indoor cats, but our third cat, Bella, the shy one who always hid, went missing during the chaos. While part of the house was still standing, we couldn’t live there, but my family and I were there every day and every evening — looking for Bella, putting out food, calling to her. Marlis and I went through everything that was left, with a fine-toothed comb. Kathy came home from Europe early and scoured inside and out. Andy searched, listened, and stood ready to open walls and floors.

The fire demolition team took up the search. We placed “missing cat” posters around the area. We alerted the animal shelters. Kathy even slept one night on the floor in the uninhabitable house hoping to hear her. In an act of sheer desperation, we hired someone who turned out to be a scammer in the form of “animal tracker” who was very happy to take a lot of our money and promise us that Bella was outside, alive and ready to come home. No cat.

Two weeks after the fire, I felt sadly sure that Bella was gone. But Kathy felt differently. She had the strongest sense that Bella was still alive. Three days later, she felt a strong pull and went into the most damaged part of the house. “Bella”, she called. She heard the faintest “meow.” She called again, and heard a tiny sound. She ran to get the flashlight, saw Bella stuck in the floorboards, and called for help.

Beyond any rational explanation, Bella survived the weeks of demolition, and was barely alive — but she was alive! Andy got her out. We rushed her to the cat hospital, where she was rehydrated, fed, and restored to health.

This isn’t just about cats. I was working with CEO of a manufacturing company when suddenly an overseas employee was missing, and feared taken hostage — maybe he was dead. The firm did everything that was rational, logical, and practical, including immediately putting many expensive experts on a team, working with governments, police, and the media as they tried to find him. As the first few days worn on, the most junior person on the CEO’s staff had this bizarre idea. He suggested they look in a very unlikely place — on their own property, but under the main building. This was based on “nothing but a hunch”. And it turns out that there he was — he has slipped and fallen in a most unlikely way. He was unconscious, but he was still alive.

When Kathy told me she still thought Bella was alive after more than two weeks of being missing, I did not stop her with my logical arguments about how we’d already tried everything. Instead, I urged her to follow her hunches. This is counterintuitive, because most of us disregard what we can’t see, measure, or prove. And most managers don’t listen to people with hunches.

Think about other “hunches” — from the people who had a feeling that the Chilean miners were still alive, to those who tried to warn BP about the unstable well in the Gulf of Mexico before it exploded. Creativity, says author Steven Johnson, often springs from what he calls the “slow hunch” — the incubation of ideas that, when colliding with other people’s ideas, build into stronger and stronger hunches, which lead eventually to a breakthrough idea.

In my view, it’s critically important for managers and leaders to nurture such hunches and create and environment where they can yield fruit. What about you? Here are three really important questions and we’d love to hear your thoughts: Have you ever had a moment when intuition — yours or someone else’s — saved the day?

As you come back to work after summer holidays, what is one intuition you should follow, not disregard?

When it really matters, and logic, expertise, and known answers fail, will you remember Bella and turn to those whose hunches can turn the impossible around?

 

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Saj-nicole Joni, chief executive of Cambridge International Group, is a confidential advisor to CEOs and top executives worldwide. She is the author, with Damon Beyer, of The Right Fight.

 

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Accelerator vs. Incubator: What’s the Difference?

Pasadena, CA-based incubator IdeaLab on the left, Los Angeles-based accelerator Amplify on the right.

Here is an excerpt from another excellent article in Christina DesMarais‘ “Launch” series for Inc. magazine.  To read the complete article, check out other online resources, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

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The terms sometimes get used interchangeably, but they’re not the same thing. And that matters if you’re thinking of applying.

If you’re interested in getting your start-up into an accelerator or incubator there’s no shortage of options. But these terms sometimes get thrown around interchangeably. Do you know the difference between the two?

I asked Paul Bricault, cofounder of Amplify, a Los Angeles-based accelerator, to define them. “An accelerator takes single-digit chunks of equity in externally developed ideas in return for small amounts of capital and mentorship. They’re generally truncated into a three to four month program at the end of which the start-ups ‘graduate,’” he says.

TechStars would be an example of an accelerator, although good luck getting in—even though thousands of companies apply every year, it only selects 10 for each of its programs.

An incubator, on the other hand, brings in an external management team to manage an idea that was developed internally. “Those ideas can gestate for much longer periods of time and the incubator takes a much larger amount of equity [compared to accelerators],” he says.

One highly successful incubator is Pasadena, California-based Idealab, which was started by Bill Gross in 1996. Bricault says Idealab itself usually comes up with all the good ideas for new businesses then recruits outside people to bring them to fruition. Incubators like Idealab take a bigger cut of the company than an accelerator does—anywhere from 20 percent or more Bricault says.

Want to get your idea incubated? Idealab doesn’t accept business plan submissions but only considers ideas it hears about from people with whom it already has a business relationship, although Bricault says that’s not the case with all incubators.

Fortunately, now there are so many to choose from. Capital efficiencies in the market have brought down the cost of creating a start-up, Bricault says, thus fueling a boom in new accelerators and incubators. “What would have taken $5 million to get off the ground with a product developed and customers and traction several years ago now can take a few hundred thousand dollars,” he says.

[For those who want to see their company get into an accelerator, DesMarais offers "a few interesting ones tailored for unique niches. To read the complete article, please click here.]

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Christina DesMarais is an Inc.com contributor who writes about the tech start-up community, covering innovative ideas, news, and trends. Follow her tweets @salubriousdish or add her to one of your circles on Google+. Have a tip? Email her at christinadesmarais@live.com.

 

Twyla Tharp: An interview by Charlie Rose

Twyla Tharp (2004)

Twyla Tharp, one of America’s greatest choreographers, began her career in 1965, and has created more than 130 dances for her company as well as for the Joffrey Ballet, The New York City Ballet, Paris Opera Ballet, London’s Royal Ballet, and American Ballet Theatre. She has won two Emmy awards for television’s Baryshnikov by Tharp program, and a Tony Award for the Broadway musical Movin’ Out. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1993 and was made an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1997. She lives and works in New York City. Her books include Push Comes to Shove: An Autobiography (1992) as well as The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life (2003) and, more recently, The Collaborative Habit: Life Lessons for Working Together, also published by Simon & Schuster (2009). The last two are available in a paperbound edition.

To watch the video of Charlie Rose’s interview of Twyla Tharp, please click here.

To check out the Wikipedia material that discusses her life and work, please click here.

The Ongoing War for Talent, because The Right Talent is So Critical for Success

After presenting my synopsis of The Rare Find by George Anders, I decided to take another look at my handout for the book The War For Talent by Ed Michaels, Helen Handfield-Jones, and Beth Axelrod, which I presented quite a few years ago.  If you are in the  “finding the best talent” game (and who isn’t?!), both of these books are worth a look.

Here is a portion of a key section from the book The War for Talent, on “the new reality”:

The Old Ethics	The New Ethics
We invest in all our people equally	Some people are more talented than others, and we invest in them accordingly
We give best performers a little more money that average performers	We give best performers a lot more money
I know Charlie’s a C player but we have to be fair to him – he’s been here fifteen years	We have to be fair to the twenty people working under Charlie
Managers don’t need pats on the back	Managers, like everyone else, need to know they are valued
Undifferentiated praise motivates the masses	Differentiation drives individual and company performance

Finding, nurturing, improving talent.  This is the name of the game.  Companies and organizations are not buildings and computer and phone systems.  They are people!  Get the people right, get the right people, get the right people doing the right things, and the company will flourish.  Get the wrong people…  well, you know where that leads.

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You can purchase my synopsis of The Rare Find, with audio + handout, at our companion web site, 15minutebusinessbooks.com.  (You can also purchase my synopsis for The War for Talent at our site, but, warning — the audio quality is not as good on our earlier synopses.  Please read the faqs about our audio quality history).