Work Matters

  • The Tension Between Getting it Done and Getting it Right

    I just went for a rather lovely long bike ride in the rain and was in a contemplative mood because I seem to be just a couple days from finishing my next book (I will tell you much more about it in a couple weeks when the powers that be agree with me that it is done).  When I got back, I had received an email from Randall who gave me feedback that, in my foreword to 40th Anniversary edition of the The Peter Principle:

    "I am disappointed that your forward did not mention
    what I believe to be the core insight in the book.  Without this
    particular insight, the rest of the book would have been nonsense:
     Competence is defined by your boss, who may or may not be competent
    themselves.  In particular, I have found the observation that competent
    bosses value output and incompetent bosses value input to be immutable.    " 

    As I thought about Randall's feedback, my reaction was that, although I do not see this as a fatal flaw (you never can put everything that people think is important in anything, or you end-up with something like Microsoft Word), that the forward would have been stronger if I had mentioned his point.

    Then,I went to look to see if there were any comments on my last post on "Leaders get the behavior that they display and tolerate," and there was more thoughtful feedback about how I might written something better, this time a suggestion that I remove the opening and reword the post.  And, again, I found the feedback useful and agree with Recruiting Animal that his apporach would have probably been better.

    This led me to start worrying about my book. I fretted, what if after about 18 months of working on it nearly every day and rewriting it over and over, having the hell edited of it, and getting feedback from people I trust,  I still  left something major out of it — or have sentences and paragraphs that still suck?  Then, calm washed over me when I remembered what my (now 91 year-old) dissertation adviser Bob Kahn told me some 30 years ago. Bob warned that my entire career, I would always have to deal with the tension between getting things right and getting things done.  That if I was too quick and sloppy, people would find my work useless and tiresome.  But if I was too much of a perfectionist, I wouldn't get very much done. 

    Walking this tightrope is never easy.  I guess I apply standards that vary depending on whether it is a blog post (this one will take about 20 minutes, I will proof it once, and no doubt, it will be as imperfect as the last one), a foreword or article (I worked on the first draft for the Peter Principle for perhaps two weeks, and then perhaps another day or two in response to editing), or a book (as I said, my current one will take a good 18 months and I have written books that took as long as 4 years and I have started at least three books that I never finished). 

    I know that I will always struggle to get this balance right yet but never will.  I also know that no matter how hard I try to make things perfect, there will always be flaws, there will always be things I wish I could go back and change, and there will always be people I can't please no matter how hard I try.  That is every author's lot in life, as well as anyone else who does creative work — from programming, to product design, to management consulting, to playing and writing music, to architecture, to hair styling, to leadership, to scientific experiments.

    I know that a lot of readers of this blog do creative work. I wonder, how do you strike this balance?  How do you decide when  it is time to toss your ideas out out into the world?

    P.S. I also want to take this chance to thank Randall and the Recruiting Animal for the comments, they were both very thoughtful. Please, anyone and everyone, don't hesitate to let me know when you have ideas about things I could have done better — and to Nicolay to catching my "forward" error.

  • Leaders get the behavior they display and tolerate

    I was at a gathering of HR managers and executives yesterday held at Pixar, and one of the participants made this observation at one point. Frankly, there were a lot of people and we kept rotating among groups, so although I write it down quickly so I wouldn't lose it, I got so lost in thought about it that by the time I looked-up, we were all rotating to different groups and I lost rack of who said it.  I will try to figure out who it was — yes, it is an oversimplification, but one of the most compelling ones I've heard.  I especially like that word "tolerate" as it conveys the subtle notion that there are often many things that happen in the workplaces that bosses don't try to discourage or stop because they have so much other stuff to do, they don't know how to go about stopping it, they believe they have more pressing matters to deal with, or they just don't have the emotional energy to deal with. 

    Then,  I started thinking about this quote again when I was watching The Office last night and saw how the tolerant Jim (now co-manager) brilliantly dealt with a level of defiance and screwing around by Ryan that he couldn't tolerate by assigning him to an office in closet (see the episode here on Hulu).

  • Oh, So That Is God’s Work

    Today's New York Times has an encouraging article about the things that Goldman Sachs is doing to cleanse its image as a greedy and destructive force in the U.S. economy and society. Apparently Warren Buffett is teach their senior team a bit of humility, or at least how to feign it.

    This is all old news, but I can't stop thinking about the comparison between how the Rolling Stone described Goldman versus how CEO Blankfein did (a statement that got him in big trouble, by the way).

    In July, a story in the Rolling Stone called "The Great American Bubble Machine" started out:

    The first thing you need to know about
    Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful
    investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of
    humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that
    smells like money. 

    In contrast, here is what Goldman CEO was quoted as saying about his job in The Times of London last week: 'I'm doing God's work."

    I am really trying to avoid the temptation to engage in mindless bashing of Goldman Sachs as I have met many people from the company I admire and in many ways it is splendidly managed company.  But the thing that gnaws at me can be gleaned from the Kurt Vonnegut poem that was published in The No Asshole Rule and that I have reprinted on this blog, called Joe Heller (read it here). When people act if no matter how much money, status, goodies, and other material goods pile-up, it is never enough for them, I start to squirm. I am glad that Goldman is reaching out to help small business , offering some 3% of their 16.7 billion in bonuses to do so.  That is a start. My gut feeling is that something closer to 50% would be more appropriate — especially for the top 100 or so people in the firm.  But I think they ought to read Vonnegut's poem, as it is a message they need to hear — especially at a time when over 10% of the U.S. workforce is unemployed, most of whom shelled-out tax money to help save Goldman and their ilk from their own greed, arrogance, and misleading statements — a new government report rebukes their claim that they didn't much benefit much at all from the massive AIG bailout (see this story in the Wall Street Journal).

    I am glad that Goldman is starting to grovel a bit and is giving a bit more back after their arrogance failed them, but I would I think they owe their fellow Americans more than a lousy 3%. I know they will be paying whopping taxes on all this money, but for me, they need to do more to help all those people who saved their ass.

  • Testosterone Levels, Top Dogs, and Collective Group Confidence

    My favorite behavioral science website, BPS Research Digest, posted a summary of an amazingly weird and rather troubling psychological experiment.  The upshot is that people — both men and women — vary in testosterone levels and (no surprise), when people with high testosterone levels aren't in leadership positions, "they can find it stressful and uncomfortable when denied the status that they crave."  A bit more surprising is that the reverse is true as well, that "people low in testosterone find it uncomfortable to be placed in positions of authority." The main finding from the research is that when groups suffer from "mismatch" between status and testosterone levels (where those with high testosterone levels are placed at the bottom of the pecking order, and those with low levels are placed at the top), the group has less confidence in its abilities get things done.  I quote from the BPS summary:

    Michael Zyphur and colleagues
    assigned 92 groups of between 4 and 7 undergrads to an on-going task
    that involved meeting twice a week for 12 weeks, and included creating
    a professional management-training video. Six weeks into the project
    the researches measured the participants' testosterone levels via
    saliva samples. They also asked all members in each group to vote on
    each others' status. Then six weeks after that, at the end of the
    project, the researchers measured each group's collective efficacy by
    summing members' confidence in their group's ability to succeed.

    The
    key finding was that groups made up of members whose status was out of
    synch with their testosterone level tended to have the lowest
    collective efficacy. The researchers think that testosterone-status
    mismatch within a group probably has a detrimental effect on that
    group's collective confidence. However, another possibility, which they
    acknowledge, is that a lack of group confidence leads to a mismatch
    between testosterone levels and status among group members.

    The implication is fairly horrifying — perhaps companies will start using testosterone levels to make decisions about whether or not to put people in leadership positions.  Even if it is "evidence-based" (although these results are preliminary), the thought makes me a bit sick. 

    Here is the reference:

    Zyphur,
    M., Narayanan, J., Koh, G., & Koh, D. (2009). Testosterone–status
    mismatch lowers collective efficacy in groups: Evidence from a
    slope-as-predictor multilevel structural equation model. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 110 (2), 70-79.

  • How Can You Help Your Boss Succeed?

    Many of the posts and comments on this blog focus on either how to be an effective boss or how to deal with a lousy boss.  No doubt, all this talk about dealing with lousy bosses is fueled by The No Asshole Rule.  But there is another theme that I believe deserves more attention here and elsewhere:  How can people help their bosses be more successful?  After all, when your boss succeeds, not only does he or she gain a better reputation, so do you, and it also usually means your team is doing better work.  I was reminded of this last week when a I gave a talk to a group of HP managers and executives. Right before my talk, they were doing an ice-breaking exercise, and as the groups reported-out, one suggested a great guideline for everyone

    “The way in which I can earn success is by driving success
    to those around me.    "

    I later found out that this quote came from Geoff Heath, who is a Senior Experience Designer and Information Architect.  He explained in a subsequent email:

    'I like to summarize that to my superiors by telling them
    “It’s my job to make you successful."    '

    I think that is a lovely and very constructive sentiment, but perhaps most useful as a kick-off to a more specific conversation.  So, I'd like to ask: what can you do to make your boss more successful?  I realize this will ultimately be a very long list. But I suggest two things for starters:

    1. We all owe it to our bosses to give them feedback about their performance, especially negative feedback — unless and until they demonstrate they aren't adult enough to hear it.

    2. We all ought to assume the best about our bosses' motivations and intentions, as most bosses really do intend to do their jobs in ways that spark performance and allow their people to work with dignity.  Of course, some bosses ultimately demonstrate this isn't the case, but it is destructive for everyone if you always assume the worst about your boss — indeed, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy that renders a competent boss incompetent.

    These are just two quick ideas, I would love to hear more.

  • My Challenge to GM: A Change You Need to Make If You Really Want Cultural Change

    Today's New York Times has a very encouraging article about the cultural and organizational changes that are happening at GM in the wake of their bankruptcy.  I was simply delighted to read about changes like this, where GM is finally beginning to tackle what Jeff Pfeffer and I call "The Otis Redding Problem."

    In the old General Motors, employees were evaluated according to a “performance measurement process” that could fill a three-ring binder. In
    Terry Woychowski’s case, for example, his job as director of G.M.’s
    vehicle engineers was spelled out in exhaustive detail, and evaluated
    every three months. But in his new job as vice president — a
    promotion he was given 20 days after G.M. emerged from bankruptcy — his
    performance review will be boiled down to a single page, something he
    had never seen in his 29 years with the company.Mr. Woychowski
    said he felt the grip of G.M.’s legendary bureaucracy start to loosen,
    something he never imagined possible. Now, such reviews are being
    scaled down and simplified across the company. “We measured ourselves ten ways from Sunday,” he said. “But as soon as everything is important, nothing is important.”

    As regular readers of this blog may recall, last November, I wrote a rather scathing post on GM's "no we can't mindset" in which I argued that GM's core competence seemed to be coming-up with reasons about why the couldn't stop doing seemingly dumb old things and start doing seemingly smart new things. I provided quite specific suggestions that stemmed from my now nearly 30 years of intermittent contact with diverse parts of the company. I am not especially good at figuring out the impact of different posts, but from the number of page views, number of comments, and the strength of the emotional reactions to it, I think this post had more impact than anything else ever written here.  This Times article suggests that they are making real progress and committed to making more.

    In that spirit, I have a pet peeve that I have been complaining about openly and repeatedly to GM managers and executives about for years.  This is a change I believe they can  and should make immediately, and that will help reverse two of GM's biggest cultural problems:

        1. Management and senior executives don't quite understand and are insulated from the experience of owning and buying a GM car — and how it stacks-up against their competitors.

        2. They think and act like too much like they are just selling cars, when in fact, they are selling a car ownership experience — yes, the car itself is an important part, but there are many other parts such as shopping for a car, buying it, having it serviced, and so on that are treated as separate and less important.

    To me the single most destructive thing they do to themselves is to have a program — one they still have — where managers and executives are given a free GM car to drive.  I have heard a lot about bits and pieces of this program over the years, but I confess to not knowing every detail.  My understanding, as I wrote last November, is that it goes something like this:

    GM has a perk for managers down to fairly
    low levels where all are given a GM car to drive – they rotate from one car to
    another.  I am not sure of the exact details,
    but answers to the questions I’ve asked over the years  suggest it goes something like this: the
    lowest level managers have to buy their own cars, the ones at somewhat higher
    levels get a new car to drive every six months or so but have to do some
    servicing, the managers who are somewhat higher-up get somewhat fancier cars and are freed from any servicing (gas
    is even put in the cars of some executives so they don’t have to go to the
    service station), and the highest level executives get a car and a driver.


    In other words, this system effectively
    insulates people in management – especially those in senior management — from
    experiencing what it is like to shop for, bargain for, purchase, service, and
    sell a car. They only get the driving experience. Well, except for the most
    senior executives, who don’t even get that experience — they watch a person in
    the front seat drive a big car.  Now, it
    is true, that the most senior executives do own GM cars for personal use, but
    it is my understanding that when a car is delivered to a senior executive,
    special attention is devoted to the car – even during the production process –to
    make sure the top brass aren’t exposed to a car with any flaws. Wouldn’t that
    be nice? 

    Here is my challenge to GM, and frankly, since you are running on U.S. taxpayer money, my money and the money of millions of us who would rather see the money going to things like education, I think that you owe to us — and yourself — to do the right thing:

    1. Get rid of the program immediately.

    2. Use the money spent on the program (even though I know it won't have the tax advantages of the old program) to give each manager and executive money to help buy a car for work — they only get the money if they buy a car.

    3. Get rid of the GM employee discount program completely, so that when managers and execs walk into a GM dealer, they have to do the same negotiation as everyone else.

    4. Stipulate that not only can people buy non GM cars, only 25% of those participating in the program at any time can own a GM car.  That way, there will be information in the company about the experience of owning a wide range of cars.

    5. Everyone — from the CEO on down — will be required to partake in the full car ownership experience, from selecting, to shopping for, to servicing, to getting gas, to selling and trading in their cars.

    There are a lot of other things about GM that need to change — or more optimistically — perhaps are already are changing. See this amazing story provided by Matt May about how badly their managers sometimes listen. But I believe that this single change will have a large and positive impact, forcing GM management and executives to break out of their isolation, to learn about competitors' car and car buying experiences, and to come to grips with what the GM ownership experience actually entails.

    Dear GM Executives: you know these problems exist, you know that this program contributes to these problems, and you are at a juncture in your history where change is possible.  Why can't you end this program immediately?  Rather than falling back on your old core competence of explaining why it is impossible for you to do the right thing, how about showing the American taxpayer and yourself too that it is possible for you to do the right thing and to do it fast?


  • Leading Innovation: 21 Things that Great Bosses Believe and Do

    CFI Goes to the Tesla Dealer
    As I blogged about awhile back, this week, Perry Klebhan, Alex Kazaks,Huggy Rao and I are running rather intense executive program called Customer-Focused Innovation.  As you can see from the schedule, we are keeping the 21 executives in the program mighty busy. We kicked off with a tire-changing  exercise led by Andy Papa, who among other things leads the pit crews at Hendrick's Motor Sports, where one team established the all time CFI speed record, changing in a tire on a NASCAR racing car in under 13 seconds. Yesterday, the group spent the day at the Tesla dealer in Menlo Park talking to owners, potential customers, people in sales and marketing at Tesla, and people who didn't like the idea of owning a Tesla at all. In the picture above, the two executives on the left are interviewing George Kembel, the d.school's executive director (he is the tall guy facing the camera) and the group on the right is interviewing one of the Tesla salespeople (the woman in black with sunglasses in her hair).

    The idea is to use their observations, empathy for others, and identified needs to develop prototype solutions to improve the Tesla car ownership experience.  The group focuses on cases, theories, and models in the mornings, and applying design thinking in the Tesla project in the afternoon. It is a lively and motivated group, and we all are very curious to see
    the suggestions and prototypes they offer to Tesla executives on
    Thursday.

    Huggy Rao and I kicked off yesterday morning by doing case discussions and a bit of lecture on the hallmarks of innovative organizations. As part of that session, I put together the list below for the executives. I've also included links for anyone who wants to dig into the subject a bit further. I will add a few more ideas and links during the course of the week.  I would love to hear some additional ways that great bosses spark innovation and comments — and extensions — on the ideas below.

    Leading
    Innovation: 21 Things that Great Bosses Believe and Do

    1.
    Creativity means doing new things with old ideas.

    2.
    Treat innovation as an import-export business. 
    Keep trying to bring in ideas from outside your group or organization,
    keep trying to show and tell others about your ideas, and blend them all
    together.

    3.
    Look for and build     “intersections” places where people with diverse ideas
    gather together. And when you go there, talk to the people you don’t know, who
    have ideas you know nothing about, and ideas you find weird, don’t like, or useless    .

    4.
     Treat your beliefs as “strong opinions, weakly held.”

    5.
    Learn how to listen, watch, and keep your mouth shut.

    6.
     Say “I don’t know” on a regular basis.

    7.
     Have the courage to act on what you
    know, and the humility to doubt your beliefs and actions.

    8.
    Reward success and (intelligent) failure, but punish inaction.

    9.
    Make it safe for people to take risky actions and “fail forward,” by developing
    a “forgive and remember culture.”

    10.
    Encourage people to learn from others’ failures – it is faster, easier, and
    less painful.

    11.
    Eliminate hiring and reward practices that reinforce cultures where “the best
    you can be is a perfect imitation of those who came before you.”

    12.
    Hire people who make your squirm.

    13.
    Create teams composed of both experts and novices.

    14.
    Make it safe for people to fight as if they are right, and listen as if they
    wrong.

    15.
    Encourage your people to be “happy worriers.”

    16.
     Sometimes, the best management is no
    management at all.  Know when and how to
    get out of the way.

    17.
    Have the confidence and resolve to make tough decisions, stop your people from
    whining about the decisions made, and to get on with implementing them    .

    18.
    Kill a lot of ideas, including a lot of good ideas.

    19.  Innovation entails creativity +
    implementation.  Developing or finding a
    great idea is useless if you can't implement it or sell it to someone who believes they
    can.

    20.
    Remember Rao’s Recipe for Innovation: Will +Ideas + Tools.

    21. Innovation requires selling your ideas.  The greatest innovators, from Edison to Jobs, are gifted at generating excitement and sales.  If you can't or won't sell, team-up with someone who can.

    As I edited this list a bit, I realized it is important to remind people that there is a lot about innovation that sucks.  Yes, it is necessary, but innovator beware, it is an inefficient and distressing process plagued by a high failure rate — and a lot of self-delusion. And that is when you are doing it right!

    Sources:  Rao’s book Market Rebels  Sutton’s Weird Ideas
    that Work    ,      and Sutton’s personal blog Work Matters. 

  • When is the change going to be over?

    An executive my wife knows reported one of her people recently asked her this question.  The last couple years have been tough on all of of us, and especially tough on people who had assumed that the future would be an imitation of the past.  Of course, the answer is that the change will never be over. More so than ever, a boss's job is to prepare his or her people by developing expectations that there will be constant change, while (as I wrote in HBR), providing as much prediction, understanding, control, and compassion as possible.

    I wonder, what else can a boss do to help people anticipate, cope with, and flourish in the face of change?

  • The Baboon Troop that Mellowed Out After the Alpha Males Died

    I got an email last night from a former student (thanks Hendrick!) who wanted to let me know that Stanford's Robert Sapolsky had done a WNYC radio show called "New Normal?" (listen here) where he described his 2004 article with Lisa Share on a troop of baboons — which became more peaceful (or at least less nasty) after the alpha males died.  It is amazing stuff, and more evidence that being a jerk and having power go hand in hand.  Here is a link to the original academic article (which I was able to download for free). It is short and quite accessible, and just astounding stuff:  Here is how I described it in The No Asshole Rule:

    Biologists Robert Sapolsky
    and Lisa Share have followed a troop of wild baboons in Kenya     for over 20 years, starting
    in 1978.  Sapolsky and Share called them
    “The Garbage Dump Troop” because they got much of their food from a garbage pit
    at a tourist lodge.  But not every baboon
    was allowed to eat from the pit in the early 1980s:  The aggressive, high status males in the
    troop refused to allow lower status males, or any females, to eat the garbage.
    Between 1983 and 1986, infected meat from the dump led to the deaths of 46% of
    the adult males in the troop. The biggest and meanest males died off.  As in other baboon troops studied, before
    they died, these top-ranking males routinely bit, bullied, and chased males of
    similar and lower status, and occasionally directed their aggression at
    females.

    But when the top ranking
    males died-off in the mid-1980s, aggression by the (new) top baboons dropped dramatically,
    with most aggression occurring between baboons of similar rank, and little of
    it directed toward lower-status males, and none at all directed at females.
    Troop members also spent a larger percentage of the time grooming, sat closer
    together than in the past, and hormone samples indicated that the lowest status
    males experienced less stress than underlings in other baboon troops. Most
    interestingly, these effects persisted at least through the late 1990’s, well
    after all the original “kinder” males had died-off.  Not only that, when adolescent males who grew
    up in other troops joined the “Garbage Dump Troop,” they too engaged in less
    aggressive behavior than in other baboon troops.  As Sapolsky put it “We don’t understand the
    mechanism of transmission… but the jerky new guys are obviously learning: We
    don’t do things like that around here.” 
    So, at least by baboon standards, the garbage dump troop developed and
    enforced what I would call a “no asshole rule.”

    I am not suggesting that you
    get rid of all the alpha males in your organization, as tempting as that may be at times.  The lesson from the baboons is
    that when the social distance between higher and lower status mammals in a
    group are reduced, and steps are taken to keep the distance smaller, higher
    status members are less likely to act like jerks.   Human leaders can use this lesson to avoid
    turning into mean, selfish, and insensitive jerks too. Despite all the
    trappings, some leaders do remain attuned to how people around them are really
    feeling, to what their employees really believe about how the
    organization is ran, and to what customers really think about their
    company’s products and services.  As “The
    Garbage Dump Troop” teaches us, the key thing these leaders do is to take
    potent, and constant, steps that dampen rather amplify the power differences
    between themselves and others (both inside and outside the company). 

    Any reactions? What do you think the implications for implementing the no asshole rule?

    P.S. I seem to have a bit of an obsession with power dynamics  in baboon troops, you may recall this post called Of Baboons and Bosses, on how lower status troop members glance at the alpha male every 20 or 30 seconds.

  • Intuition vs. Data-Driven Decision-Making: Some Rough Ideas

    A Stanford undergraduate doing a case analysis on using intuition versus systematic analysis wrote me an email last night to get my thoughts on the difference between the two, especially in light of the work that Jeff Pfeffer and I did on evidence-based management.  Below is my lightly edited response.  This is just off the top of my head (is it mostly intuition?).  I would love to hear your thoughts on this distinction — if it is useful, how the two concepts fit together, when one is more useful than the others, and so on:

    I don't think that intuition and evidence-based management
    are at odds. There are many times when decision-makers don't have very good
    data because something is new, the situation has changed (e.g., where do you invest
    money right now?), or because what might seem like
    intuition is really mindless well-rehearsed behavior that comes from years of
    experience at something, so even though people can't articulate the pattern they
    recognize, they still are acting on a huge body of experience and knowledge.
    And on the very other side of experience there are virtues to the gut reaction of naive people, as those who are not properly
    brainwashed may see things and come up with ideas that expertise drives out of
    their brains (e.g, that is why Jane Goodall was hired to observe chimps, in
    part, because she knew nothing).

    The trouble with intuition is that we now have a HUGE
    pile of research on cognitive biases and related flaws in decision-making that
    show "gut feelings" are highly suspect.  Look-up confirmation bias — people have a
    very hard time believing and remember evidence that contradicts their beliefs. There
    is also the fallacy of centrality, a lot more obscure, but important in that
    people — especially those in authority — believe that if something important
    happens, they will know about it.     

    My belief — and it is only partially evidence-based —
    is that intuition works best in the hands of wise people (this is all over hard
    facts), when people have the mindset to "act on their beliefs, while
    doubting what they know," so that they are always looking for
    contradictory evidence, encouraging those around them to challenge what they
    believe, and constantly updating (but always moving forward), then I think that
    intuition — or acting on incomplete information, hunches, conclusions — is
    right. Here is one place I've talked about it. Brad Bird of Pixar is a good
    example of someone with this mindset, as we learned when we interviewed him for
    the McKinsey Quarterly.  So is Andy
    Grove.  I think the most interesting
    cases to look at are those where people with a history of good guesses or gut
    decisions — what mistakes has Steve Jobs made? 
    What about Google… indeed, it is interesting that they believed they
    were going to crush Firefox with Chrome , but their market share remains modest a year later. My point here isn't to say anything negative about Jobs or Google — they have impressive track records, plus some history of the usual failures that all humans and human organizations suffer from.  Rather, my point is that by looking at errors by people and firms that have generally good track records, you can learn a lot about conditions under which judgment fails, because you can rule out the explanation that they generally suffer from judgment. 

    There is a lot written on intuition and the related topic
    of quick assessments — see Blink — and some evidence (although Gladwell
    exaggerates about the virtues of snap judgments, as the best are often made by
    people with much experience in the domain, but as always he makes wonderful points). Also see this book     by David Myers for a balanced
    and evidenced perspective on intuition.

    My view is that intuition and analysis are not opposing
    perspectives, but tag team partners that, under the best conditions, where
    hunches are followed and then evaluated with evidence (both quantitative and
    qualitative, that is another issue, qualitative data are different than
    intuition, and often better) versus when hunches and ingrained behaviors are
    mindlessly followed and impervious to clear signs that they are failing. 

    Work Matters readers: Again, I would appreciate your thoughts, as this is one of those core challenges for every boss and for a lot of behavioral scientists too!