Malcolm Gladwell on Intuition

  Career Development   Decision Making   PM Network  

Time magazine described Malcolm Gladwell as one of the 100 most influential people in the world for his outside-the-box interpretations of social science research. The author of bestsellers The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference [Little, Brown and Company, 2000], Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking [2005], Outliers: The Story of Success [2008] and What the Dog Saw [2009], Mr. Gladwell leads his readers on odysseys into the inner workings of the human mind.

One of his most notable findings was the value of intuition. A long list of inventors, engineers, researchers and business leaders—from Albert Einstein to Steve Jobs to Jonas Salk—have acknowledged the importance of intuition in their decision-making.

“Improvisation and intuition represent two important and related aspects of management in general and of the management of projects in particular,” noted Stephen Leybourne and Eugene Sadler-Smith, authors of a recent study on the subject.

PM Network asked Mr. Gladwell, the keynote speaker at this month’s PMI Global Congress 2011— North America, to provide insights on intuition and its role in business and project management.

PM Network: Why is intuition important? How can project professionals leverage it in their work?

Malcolm Gladwell: A tremendous amount of expertise resides in the …

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