Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious by Gerd Gigerenzer is the book that I so wanted Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell to be. Not that I’m dissing Gladwell, but it just didn’t address what I wanted to know about going with your gut in a business setting. Most entrepreneurs live on gut instinct. If we didn’t, we’d be duplicating others’ efforts and ideas. In essence, it’s our gut decisions that help us innovate, and I wanted to know 1. when to trust my own; and 2. how to influence my customers’ gut instincts.
At the outset of the book, Gigerenzer dabbles in the realm of Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less when he talks about how too much choice can cause indecision or lack of satisfaction. This is a philosophy I wholeheartedly believe in (and not just because I survived my child’s pre-k years).
Lesson for entrepreneurs: Clients want choice, but if you give them too many, it may prompt indecision, inaction or less satisfaction with the choice they made.
Gigerenzer also discusses name recognition and how that can play into decision making. Hence the basis for the old marketing adage that people need to hear your message at least three times and sometimes in three different mediums to make an impact. This section brought to mind a conversation I once had at a networking event where I met a young woman who worked at a PR firm that had, just that week, made headlines for a blatant, high-profile conflict of interest. A third woman had joined us and enthusiastically said, “Hey, I saw something about your company in the paper this week. Congrats, that’s great.â€? Clearly she had seen the PR company’s name, but either she hadn’t read the article or didn’t recollect it at the time. It just goes to show that having your company’s name in the paper even for bad reasons–unless it’s on par with Enron–can help with name recognition.
Lesson for entrepreneurs: You need to build a recognizable and memorable brand so that you’re in customers’ unconscious. I’ll have more on how to do this next month when I do a review of what I’m guessing will be my favorite business book of 2008: Accidental Branding: How Ordinary People Created Extraordinary Brands. I’m partway through my advance copy.
Other lessons for entrepreneurs: I really enjoyed Gigerenzer section on corporate culture as it looked at how leaders influence companies by the little things they do. If they’re on email 24/7, the company is on email 24/7. He also has some really great ideas about how to share success across a team and make sure everyone feels on an equal footing. Why is this relevant to gut instincts? Because leaders can influence their employees’ gut feelings. There was also another interesting section on social instincts that questions the often-stated idea that humans are basically selfish and self-focused. If this were the case, Gigerenzer argues, we would not have family instincts and community instincts, and most humans want to belong to one or both groups.
The Top Shelf Bottom Line: Gut Feelings is an intriguing look into something we’ve often struggled to explain: “I don’t know why, but my gut says I should do this.� The one thing I took away is that my gut is usually telling me something for a reason. Now if I can just get my customers’ guts to follow my own, then I’ll be all set.
This entry was posted on Sunday, December 23rd, 2007 at 8:52 am and is filed under Nonfiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.Leave a Reply
