Going beyond ‘golden gut’

If you are a manger who is adamant at relying on your ‘golden gut’ or intuition to make decisions, this book is not for you: ‘Analytics at Work’ by Thomas H. Davenport, Jeanne G. Harris, and Robert Morison (Harvard). The authors concede that sometimes intuitive experience-based decisions work out well, but they hasten to warn that often such decisions either go astray or end in disaster.

The authors cite examples of the most extreme cases of ill-informed decision making, such as executives pursuing mergers and acquisitions to palliate their egos, neglecting the sober considerations that create real value; banks making credit and risk decisions based on unexamined assumptions about always-rising asset values; and governments relying on sparse intelligence before deciding whether to wage war.

Full review here Hindu