Use of intuition in business strategy development.

摘要

Increased global competition drives corporate leaders to make definitive, reliable, strategic business development decisions quickly to take advantage of new business opportunities. Scholars invested decades of research in an attempt to draw parallels and distinctions when comparing and contrasting various approaches to strategy development, primarily divided between intuitive and analytic methodologies. Business development and business expansion decisions can be complex, precarious, and require an increased level of profit and loss responsibility for the decision maker. Many internationally recognized, successful leaders relied solely on intuition, while others relied solely on analysis, establishing a contradiction in methodologies. The problem facing business development managers who are new to strategic decision-making is whether one method, either an intuitive or analytical process, is more likely to produce positive results. This case study was designed to better understand the use of intuition versus the use of analytics in making strategic business development decisions in order to identify which method was perceived to be more effective. Interviews with study subjects explored how the executives responsible for business development established or selected the company's expansion strategies, and whether they used intuition, analytics, or a combination of the two methods to reach those decisions. The qualitative study findings relate theoretical indications that an association exists between intuition and the process of making strategic decisions, as well as the choice to use analytics or intuition as the basis for strategy development.