William Duggan on Strategic Intuition

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 24 December 2007

⏱️ 56 minutes

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Summary

William Duggan, professor of management at Columbia Business School at Columbia University, talks about his latest book, Strategic Intuition. Duggan critiques traditional methods of strategy and planning and suggests that the opportunism and adaptability are more productive detailed plans. He also discusses the nature of intuition and creativity along with insights into how the brain works to better understand problem-solving.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts
0:13.9	of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org
0:21.2	where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to
0:26.5	other information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd
0:33.6	love to hear from you. Just a brief word before introducing today's guest. This will be our
0:42.1	last podcast of the year. We're going to take a break next week and our next podcast will be Monday,
0:47.9	January 7th, 2008. We've got a lot of exciting guests lined up for the new year and I'm looking
0:54.2	forward to continuing our conversation. Please keep the emails and comments coming. I look forward
0:59.4	to talking with you in 2008. My guest today is William Duggan, a professor of management at Columbia
1:06.0	University's Business School. His latest book is Strategic Intuition, the Creative Spark in
1:11.9	Human Achievement. Bill, Welcome to Econ Talk. Thank you. Our topic for today is Strategic
1:16.9	Intuition. Let's start by talking about what you mean by strategy. Well, what I mean by strategy
1:24.1	is certainly a very simple and, I think, uncontroversial definition. It's simply how do you figure out
1:31.1	what your goal is and what activities you're going to do to achieve your goal? That strategy in
1:36.1	its simplest form. Of course, there are infinite complications of it as different people propose
1:42.3	their ways to do that, certainly, especially in business. And how do business schools in America
1:50.9	go about trying to teach people a strategic thinking strategy generally? Is this something that can
1:56.8	be taught? Well, these are two different subjects as I have found out myself and that's why I wrote
2:04.0	my book. Strategy as taught in business schools is not exactly the same as strategic thinking.
2:12.1	And let me tell you what I mean by that. In most business schools, the dominant way people
2:18.6	teach strategies these days is to teach strategic analysis where you use economic concepts and
2:25.4	as much economic data as you can find to analyze your industry, your customers, your own situation.
	...

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