Business Intuition - The Future of Corporate America
by Elise Lebeau, M.Sc.

Maturing world markets have created tremendous pressure on Corporate America to stay competitive. After downsizing and outsourcing, we're down to the wire. Most companies are reduced to looking for cheaper ways to offer their products or services, thus compromising their quality standards just to stay alive. When that happens, everybody is dissatisfied:

• The customer who bought a crappy product.
• The employee who has to answer complaints about the crappy product.
• The stock holder or partner whose investment is melting in shrinking profit margins.

And yet, entrepreneurs want to succeed. They want to make good products. They want proud and happy employees. They want to do business while upholding their principals. The true meaning of sustainable success is to achieve your financial goals while maintaining good relationships with your collaborators. This is where strategic Business Intuition comes into place. Intuition is a form of intelligence that uses a right brain approach to generate ideas and solutions from a divergent thinking perspective (the famous "think outside the box"). It is based on Emotional Intelligence (the ability to perceive and manage emotions in self and others), a critical skill of successful decision makers. Business Intuition is rapidly gaining momentum in the business world: 62% of CEOs use their gut feelings when making decisions (2006, PRWeek/Burson-Marsteller CEO Survey). Billionaires such as Trump and Oprah both publicly attribute their success to intuition. Certain areas are more likely to achieve quick and obvious results from using Business Intuition.

• Marketing efforts
  Does your sales team know how to use their Emotional Intelligence to establish an emotional connection with prospectives clients? Using intuition before and during a call provides you with leverage in cold call situation where you have no other source of information.
• Employee satisfaction
  By using intuition, you can identify the top problems affecting your employees as a group. And you might be surprised by the creative solutions that would solve these core problems!
• Business relationships
  When research doesn't give you a clear green light on a business deal, intuition can provide much better results than a lucky guess (or worst, a blind guess!). When you see someone who is able to take the right decision in seconds, like Trump, you know they're not relying just on facts.

Unfortunately, the potential of Business Intuition is still hindered by a poorly structured approach to it. Sporadic "gut feelings" can hardly become a transferable skill within a company. It's difficult to develop your ability at something you don't understand. But more and more entrepreneurs are realizing the unlimited potential of intuition in keeping up with a fast-pace business world. This realization opens the door to a deeper understanding of intuition and its application in business. There's always a solution. It just doesn't always come from your left brain!

The challenges of Corporate America can be successfully addressed by relying on the ingenuity provided by a structured approach to Business Intuition. To some, it's the only rational way to go:
"The only real valuable thing is intuition"
- Albert Einstein

Elise Lebeau, M.Sc. is a Professional Business Intuitive, providing a result-oriented approach to strategic business planning. She offers individual consultations and Applied Intuition trainings on her web site: Strategic Business Intuition.