In admiration of Intuitive management A.V.R.

Rao

In admiration of
Intuitive management
Cultivating your intuition to help you in business and personal decisions,
can yield extra-ordinary results and personal fulfillment

A.V.R. Rao, BA, BL, FCS, FICWA1

Understanding Intuition

Haven’t you heard at any time a shrill voice within you accepting or rejecting your
proposed course of action? That shrill voice is loosely referred to as intuition.
Plenty of research and study have gone into the understanding of management
theories. In spite of this, management continues to be an inexact science, if at all it
can be so called, and, therefore it is defined, quite often, as the art of making
decisions with insufficient information. Many a time, it is referred to as the sixth
sense and a mother of creativity and invention too. Therefore, an executive will
necessarily have also to depend upon something other than facts and circumstances
to make effective decisions and that something can be called intuition.

Though intuition is frequently mistaken for judgment, it may aptly be defined as

knowledge gained without rational thought. Intuition is not impulse, thought or
feeling. Intuition is not mere hunch or a haphazard thought that accidentally pops
into one’s head occasionally, but an inner insight consciously rising up to warn or
help the person in moments of crisis and bewilderment.

1
avrrao@yahoo.com; avrrao1940@gmail.com http://www.linkedin.com/in/AVRRao. Currently Guest faculty at IIM,
Bangalore and on various sub-committees of Bangalore Chamber of Industry and Commerce

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Everything we do cannot be scientific, logical, analytical and strictly according to

rules and regulations. Whether in personal lives or business situations, subjectivity,
emotions, convictions, passions and intuition drive our decisions, be it in normal
situations or conflicts.

The Columbia Viking Desk Encyclopedia defines intuition in terms of philosophical

knowledge when it says, “Intuitionism, philosophic theory that man may have or
obtain knowledge (and truth) directly and immediately, quite apart from his
experience or his reasoning. A distinction is made between intellect and intuition,
between rational argument and suprarational comprehension (e.g. a mystic’s
knowledge of God.)”

Alvin Toffler, in one of his best sellers, Power Shift, places intuition at a high
pedestal when he says, “All arrangements that affect the flow of information allocate
or relocate power. In baronial organisations the CEO must continually negotiate
with his or her executive barons, playing them off against one another to avoid being
neutered or ousted by a coalition of them. Leadership under such conditions is less
likely to be impersonal and spuriously ‘scientific’ and more dependent, instead on
intuitive sensitivity, empathy, along with guile, guts and plenty of old fashioned
emotion.”2

Dr.S.Radhakrishnan3 brings out an excellent classification of intuition saying, “Four

are the varieties of intuition: (1) the sensuous (indriya-nimittam); (2) the mental
(manasa-pratyaksa) which is consequent on the previous sensuous intuition, having
for its object the point-instant immediately following that of the sensuous. The need
for admitting this rather ghostly function is the same that prompted Kant to
formulate his schematism of the categories, i.e. to find modus vivendi between
perception and thought; (3) the direct intuition (self-awareness, sva-samvedana) of
consciousness and the mental states as pleasure and pain, etc. These are neither
non-cognised as in the Bhatta view nor cognised by another state as in Nyaya; (4)
The yogi-pratyaksa is the non-sensuous intellectual intuition of the saint, who by the
power of concentration (bhavana) perceives things as they are with the utmost
clarity.”

2
Power Shift by Alvin Toffler, p.174
3
History of Philosophy, Eastern and Western, by Dr.S.Radhakrishnan, p.202

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Swami Vivekananda4 equates intuition with the supernatural while classifying

energy levels thus, “There are three grades of manifestation in living beings: (1) sub-
conscious - mechanical, unerring; (2) conscious - knowing, erring; (3) super-
conscious - intuitional, unerring; and these are illustrated in an animal, man and
God.”

While logic and analysis in business decision making concentrate on just meeting the
business objectives, intuition goes beyond this limited purpose and takes into
account the well-being of those beyond the organisation like the society, nation and
humanity at large. This is equally so in the case of personal decisions.

The mystery of our birth and progress in this life so far, whether in the occupational
or private fields, is understood better by intuition than by logic and intellectual
fancy. Intuition is the driving force behind thought and feelings, but itself neither of
them. The reach of intuition is well beyond what the five senses can comprehend or
the mind can assimilate. It has no limitations of time and space and, therefore, can
dig into the past, present and future, here and everywhere. It can go beyond the
current baffling logical and analytical conclusions. Fortunately, the immense
potential of intuition can be tapped for decision making in complex business or
personal situations.

Cultivating Intuition

There are some pre-requisites and processes to cultivate intuition. Ranking first
among all the pre-requisites is purity of heart and an altruistic attitude. Intuition
cannot reside, much less grow, in a wicked heart, which always tries to trample
others for selfish motives. Intuitive abilities flourish and work at their best in a
frame of mind where love, affection, compassion, truth, honesty and selfless service
abound.

Watch out for those occasional moments when suddenly some thought arises in your
deeper mind dissuading you from proceeding with your proposed action or

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persuading you to initiate some action. Immersed as you might be in

understanding a bundle of facts and logical conclusions placed before you, catch on
to that unusual suggestion that crops up in you unrelated to the facts before you.
Recognise it to be intuitive prompting and ride on to its flow, giving up all other
thoughts and activities. When intuitive thoughts surface, listen to them and
encourage them to come out with more clarity. If not, at the slightest sign of
ignoring it, it disappears from the scene and leaves you to exercise your free will to
your own peril. Intuition needs to be recognised and nourished over a period of
time. The more its advice is heeded to, the more it will grow and assist you.

The objective of increasing the frequency of occurrence of intuition can be achieved

in the same simple manner as increasing the frequency of a friend’s or a relative’s
visit. Whenever intuition surfaces in your mind, pay attention and treat it as a
welcome guest instead of scoffing it off as a random hunch.

The process to cultivate intuition is simple, though rarely followed. Get into silence.
Pray and meditate. Allow your inner voice to become audible and freely express
itself. Establish contact with the inner world rather than heeding to the calls of the
cravings of the senses. This does not mean that you should become a sanyasin,
but it simply means that you should lead a regulated and moderate life paying as
much attention to the need for relaxing the mind as you do for relaxing the body. It
is in the serene depths of the mind that intuition resides. When the intuitive
prompting surfaces, heed to it instead of shutting it off cynically and running after
the noises and callings of the external world. Intuition needs to be nurtured
tenderly for it to grow, blossom flowers and yield fruits. The process is not like
taking a crash course on statistics and trying to grasp it in a few days. Intuition
cannot be recognised and understood effectively, much less acted upon, in the first
few trials, and consequently get disheartened when failure occurs. Using this
cautionary approach, you should tread the path confidently and with humility so as
to make intuition a life partner in all your trials and tribulations, successes and
failures. Intuition cannot be commanded to yield results, but humbly prayed to
guide. As soon as the symptoms of intuition are felt, you should stop doing
everything else and carefully listen to its prompting. It will then freely come out

4
The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, vol.8, p.17

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In admiration of Intuitive management A.V.R. Rao

and guide. It is too shy to gate crash and give you unsolicited advice, but waits
silently behind he scene to be tenderly brought up to the stage and prayed for
guidance.

Trust your intuition and you will never have to regret for it. Of course, this has to
be done after you have made all your efforts and only after making sure that it is not
a pseudo-intuition.

Intuition will be curbed not only by the thoughtless individual but also by
established systems which don't allow it to blossom and yield fruits. Let us hear
Alvin Toffler bemoaning “Today, high-speed change requires equally high speed
decisions - but power struggles make bureaucracies notoriously slow. Competition
requires continual innovation - but bureaucratic power crushes creativity. The
new business environment requires intuition as well as careful analysis - but
bureaucracies try to eliminate intuition and replace it with mechanical, idiot-proof
rules.”5

Roy Rowan identifies five phases of intuition: Recognition (looks can be deceptive),
Preparation (creativity favours the prepared mind), Incubation (letting the
subconscious do the work), Illumination (waking up in the middle of the night and
shouting, ‘Eureka, I’ve got it!) and Verification (then working it all out linearly).

In attempting to establish the criteria for recognising real intuition, a few important
features need be noticed in order to avoid falling in a trap or being led astray by
pseudo intuitions. However, the entanglement of intuition and pseudo intuition
and the uncertainties of both need not drive us away from using the valuable
intuitive prompting. It is possible to cut the knots and recognise real intuition.

The best guide for recognising intuition comes from Dr.Paul Brunton6, “Wrong
personal intention may be negated by right intuitive guidance, but it is not easy to
recognise the latter as such. The difference between a mere impulse and a real
intuition may often be detected in two ways: first by waiting a few days as the sub-
conscious mind has then a chance to offer help in deciding the matter; second by

5
Power Shift by Alvin Toffler, p.195
6
Dr.Paul Brunton’s Notes, Vol.13

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noting the kind of emotion which accompanies the message. If the emotion is of the
lower kind, such as anger, indignation, greed or lust, it is most likely an impulse. If
of the higher kind, such as unselfishness or forgiveness, it is most likely an intuition.
It is never present without certain qualities being present with it, too. There is first
an utter serenity, then a steady joy, next an absolute conviction of its truth and
reality, finally the paradoxical feeling of a rock-firm security despite any appearance
of adverse outer circumstances.”

In the preparation phase, you have to set goals and priorities, concentrate and adopt
visualisation techniques in whatever you do. Training yourself constantly to
recognise real intuition is of utmost importance in using it. Cultivating intuition
and tenderly nourishing it are the key to befriending it.

The third phase, incubation, is a vital step in cultivating intuition. Roy Rowan7
gives us a road map to this, though he is modest enough to say that these are only
recommended procedures. Here are these:

 Keep the overall problem continuously in mind.

 Redefine the problem frequently.
 Consider many options simultaneously.
 Don't be afraid of maintaining an unsophisticated, childlike view. As Piasco
said ‘it takes a long time to grow young’.
 Pursue trial and error thinking, but rely on nonverbal imagery.
 Distinguish between real obstacles and imagined ones that don't have to be
surmounted.
 Don't feel compelled to excuse a zigzag or obscure route to an objective. The
right path is hard to discern.
 Don't count on instant success. Feel confident of being able to absorb string of
setbacks en route to an elusive goal. The road to intuition, after all, is always
slippery.

The illumination phase is virtually an automatic result of the earlier ones, provided
you keep your alert in welcoming it.

7
The Intuitive Manager by Roy Rowan

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The last phase, the process of verification of the real intuition, is hard to implement
but Roy Rowan8 helps us by giving the following bench marks for this;
 do the facts support your hunch?
 be prepared to back down
 rehearse your idea with a core of advisers
 listen to the rumblings from below
 stay tuned to your intuition
 can the idea be test-marketed?
 give your ideas time to ripen
 the proof is in the product

Managerial Effectiveness

Samuel Certo defines Managerial effectiveness as “the degree to which management

attains organisational objectives. It is measured by how close organisations come to
achieving their goals.”9

Managerial effectiveness is a function of various factors like job skills, training,

personal attitudes, organisational culture and structure, economic and political
environment and so on. Nothing is static in management and everything
undergoes continuous evolution or decay. Intuition is an important catalytic agent
and a component of personal attitudes and ranks very high amongst all the factors in
improving managerial effectiveness. If managerial effectiveness is all about taking
crucial and timely decisions, planning out the various phases of activities and
implementing them, all often under adverse circumstances and with insufficient
information, intuition is an important element in achieving these.

Significance of intuition
The most serious barrier to improvement in any field does not lie in the external
environment or people, but in the indifference and inability of a person to call for
and utilise his own inner potential, intuitive abilities being most important amongst

8
ibid
9
Modern Management: Diversity, Quality, Ethics, and the Global Environment by Samuel C.Certo.

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them all. Engulfed by a casual skepticism and deep rooted cynicism based on some
‘modern’ educational systems, he turns a blind eye to this great potential within
himself.

Even with the amazing capabilities of the fifth generation computers, the likelihood
of new decision supportive tools being developed, that are capable of guiding in
complex business and personal situations without the need for intuitive abilities, is
extremely low. Where even the most powerful tools of management, be it logic or
analysis, supported by the most modern computers, fail, intuition moves
unhesitatingly and surely.

Marketing techniques like logical reasoning and statistical analysis, despite riding
the crest of popularity among the management professionals have very serious
limitations in bringing about business success. The sheer size and variety of the
population defy the utility of such techniques. Look at the recent experience of
some multinationals. With all these strengths backed up by their multinational
image and financial / product strengths, the business giants in the consumer
industry like Kellogg, Coca-cola, Whirlpool, Mercedes-Benz, General Foods and
Peugeot overestimated the Indian market and Indian consumer’s attitudes, and
miserably failed to reach even a respectable percentages of their targets.10 Perhaps,
they relied excessively on logical and analytical tools and ignored intuition’s
prompting.

Realisation of the value of intuitive abilities in driving not only business but also
personal decisions is increasingly felt in business circles. The evidence is seen in the
inclusion of spiritual and meditation sessions in training and day to day functional
patterns of senior executives all over the world.

With all its peculiarities and limitations, intuition is still a powerful tool in decision
making and has been frequently adopted by chief executives all over the world. Just
look at the industrial giants and pioneers of the previous century. Most of them did
not have formal education, let alone degrees from management institutions, but they
still excelled in building industrial empires. Perhaps one common trait among all of

10
Business World 22 Oct. 97

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them is their intuitive ability to go beyond the facts presented to them by their senior
executives and take decisions, often baffling them, by going against their logic and
reasoning.

Emphasising on the importance of intuition in a business executive’s life, Roy Rowan

exerts “while using the physical eye, don't forget the existence of mind’s eye.
Recognize the mysterious, creative process that works outside our conscious
awareness which quietly remains available to help us solve our most difficult
problems. Today’s decision-makers live intensely and have more obligations and
money than they have time. For them the highest need is to cut through the
complexities of the modern world and come to quick creative decisions
intuitively.”11

Dr.Paul Brunton elevates the moments of contacts with intuition to the spiritual level
when he says, “There is a feeling of sacredness, of holy peace at such moments and
they should be cherished for the precious moments that they are. They contain
hints of the communion with the Higher Self, elements of something beyond the
ordinary self, and possibilities of transcending the past with its debris of memories
and mistakes.”12

Intuition in action

None of the usual processes of collecting data, analysing it, evaluating the
alternatives and arriving at conclusions is used by intuition. It jumps into action
utilising its abilities to penetrate into the unknown and tapping into universal
energy and arrives at a clue to problems, but normally after sufficient time has
elapsed since the problem is entrusted to it.

Intuition operates in proportion to the need and only when it is depended upon,
trusted and encouraged.

With unlimited facts at its command, for it can tap into the whole reservoir of
knowledge in the cosmic universe, intuition goes beyond the analytical

11
The Intuitive Manager by Roy Rowan
12
Dr.Paul Brunton’s Notes, Vol.13

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understanding of a situation and is capable of synthesizing the various driving

forces leading to the situation and thereby emerging out with a more effective
action plan.

A question genuinely arises whether there will be plurality of directions shown by

intuitive prompting or will it give one decisive answer to the problems on hand.
What if two or more courses of action suggested contradict each other when we
cannot obey one without disobeying the other. No. No such situations will come
up in practice and if it does it is really not intuitive prompting. Intuition is not the
same as impulsive thoughts, but much more than logical and analytical efforts
would have gone into, albeit invisibly, before intuitive prompting surfaces.
Intuition is not a first level recourse, but the last, after all humanly possible efforts
have been put in. It is a step posterior to logic and analysis and never a component
of it. Intuition is not a tool for an effortless immediate application by which our
duty in particular circumstances can be avoided. It is a guiding star towards which
we have to move on our own.

Unfortunately, intuition is a jealous companion and does not step in until the last
moment and until all other efforts have been made and failed. You cannot
command it to serve you; rather you need to patiently wait for its grace. In other
words, it will come to your aid and pull you out of your predicaments when, and
only when, you have zealously cultivated it and you totally surrender to it.

Handling intuition

Intuition is not a substitute for reasoning based on simple comprehension, logic and
analysis. In fact, it should never be used for problems which these tools can easily
solve. It is a powerful weapon to be commissioned only when the problem is so
complex and intriguing that the ordinary tools of decision making become
inadequate. Intuition shows the way, but reasoning and human effort are still
needed to implement its directions.

When we are faced with two or more ostensible grounds of right decisions, as
thrown up by logical and tools, it is only proper to examine whether they have any

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single unifying thread leading to a cohesive commonality and only later to look to
intuitive prompting before proceeding further.

Intuition is without any doubt whatsoever highly reliable, but only when it is not
distorted by human reasoning or when pseudo-intuition is not mistaken for real
intuition.

Rewards of intuitive living

Living intuitively may not change the real world outside you; adversities and
difficulties continue to confront you. But, your attitude towards and the technique
of handling them change dramatically. You will meet situations more confidently
and without tension and anxiety about the outcome. You will emerge triumphant in
situations that may vanquish many others.

Finally, if you feel that the thoughts about intuition expressed here are convincing
and in due course practical, the greatest homage you can pay is to use your intuitive
abilities for the welfare of humanity, be they in the field of business or service.

AVR Rao
182, 29 Main, 10A Cross
JP Nagar 1st phase
Bangalore 560078, India

(080) 26636761; Cell 9901477595, 9945826510

avrrao@yahoo.com; avrrao1940@gmail.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/AVRRao

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