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Your intuition: friend or foe?
Back it up with data like Starbucks did
George Pillari
October 10, 2024
In partnership with
Read Time 1m35s
More than 40 years ago, Howard Schultz was a senior executive of a little company called Starbucks. Schultz went on a trip to Italy and noticed that, unlike the United States, there were coffee shops on every corner.
Coffee shops are for socializing (and for drinking coffee)
His intuition told him something like, Why is the density of coffee shops so high in Europe and so low in the U.S.? Schultz went on to become the CEO of Starbucks and built one of the fastest growing businesses ever. But was it all based on his hunch?
Intuition or sometimes known as making a hunch, is a subconscious brain activity. In the back of your mind, there are loads of facts and patterns that are quickly assimilated (without you realizing it) to help you form an instant impression. Your intuition created an assessment in the background, pushed it forward to your conscious mind, and then you said it out loud. And it all happened at speeds that any computer, search engine, or ChatGPT would envy.
The Starbucks trajectory may have started with one man’s intuition, but it turned out to be a situation where the data backed up that lightning-fast judgement made in Schultz’s brain.
Today, even after Starbucks has opened more than 10,000 stores in the U.S. and competitors probably added an additional 10,000, coffee consumption per person in the U.S. is still less than half of what it is in top coffee-consuming nations like Belgium, Denmark, and Sweden. Even Canadians consume 50% more coffee per person than their U.S. counterparts. True, some of these differences are deeply cultural and driven by climates, but the point is that one man’s intuition — we need more coffee shops in the U.S. — was supported by the data and it wound up driving one of the biggest shifts in U.S. consumer behavior ever.
Key Takeaways
Use your intuition wisely. Back up those flash judgments with data.
Keep an honest scorecard on how accurate your intuition really is.
Note that many times, intuition is specific to certain topics. Your intuition may be good at indicating whether an interviewee will succeed, but you may have no feel for whether a salesperson is ripping you off.
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