Cultivating the Creative Seventh Sense with William Duggan

I had a chance to interview William Duggan, professor at Columbia Business School and author of Strategic Intuition. He explained how Kendo led him to his big idea, the difference between creative/strategic intuition and expert intuition (with examples including Howard Schultz, Henry Ford, and Elizabeth Holmes), and the roles of memory, passion, and presence of mind.

Quotes that stuck with me:

There is no now. Everything is history. … There is no other guide to the future.

You don't have to have the passion before you have the idea. The idea gives you the passion. Oh great, this is what I'm gonna do.

How do you judge an idea when you have it? Is it based on real knowledge and experience? Real pieces of the puzzle. That's how you judge.

The moment you step into the battle, you forget everything. Meaning that you let your brain make the correct connections. That's the presence of mind, where your mind is clear. In martial arts, it's very fast, but it's really the same idea. It's to clear your mind and let your brain make its own connections, according to the situation and the circumstances.

A lot of people think Henry Ford invented the assembly line. He did not. The assembly line was invented a hundred years before, at the start of the Industrial Revolution. He invented a certain kind of assembly line, meaning he put together the old assembly line with something new.

I like to distinguish the natural flash of insight … Steve Jobs was good at it. He'd search and search and search and then something would strike him. I don't know if you know about the origin of Starbucks. Howard Schultz was working for a coffee company, high quality coffee, where you fill up your bag and take the coffee beans home. He goes to Milan for the first time in his life and he sees the coffee bar and he says, oh, okay, well we should clearly convert all our stores into that.