Lest you believe I advocated using analytical processes in making all decisions during my leadership journey, I didn’t. Often, I relied on less-than-the-best and satisfactory, not optimal solutions. I found myself in alignment with Jeff Bezos, who said in an interview by David Rubenstein that he relied on heart, intuition, and guts, not analysis, for major decisions in life and business. He advocated using analysis when you could, but recognized that, so often in life, he relied on instinct, intuition, taste, and heart for his most important decisions.[i]
In the interview, when asked why he bought the Washington Post, Bezos said that he was approached by someone he knew to ascertain his interest. Then, he said, “I did some soul-searching. My decision-making process on something like this would definitely be intuition and not analysis.
“The financial situation of the Washington Post at that time—2013—was very upside down. It’s a fixed-cost business, and they had lost a lot of revenue over the previous five or six years. I said, ‘Is this something I want to get involved in? If I’m going to do it, I’m going to put some heart into it and some work into it.’ I decided I would do that if I really believed it was an important institution.
“As soon as I started thinking about it that way, I was like, ‘This is an important institution. It’s the newspaper in the capital city of the most important country in the world. The Washington Post has an incredibly important role to play in this democracy.’
“Today, with the Internet, you get that gift of free distribution. We had to take advantage of that gift. That was the basic strategy. We had to switch from a business model where we made a lot of money per reader, with a relatively small number of readers, to a tiny bit of money per reader on a very large number of readers. That’s the transition we made.”[ii]
Interestingly, Bezos performed analysis, mentally, not with a spreadsheet. He analyzed the situation, understood the economy of scale the internet provided, and made a decision based on a combination of analysis and intuition. Most decisions that I make also involve a combination of analysis and intuition; based on the situation, the weight I assign to each can differ significantly.
When asked about his decision to leave Compaq for Apple, Tim Cook shared with Rubenstein information about his interview with Steve Jobs, “Steve met me on Saturday. Just minutes into talking with him, it was like, ‘I want to do it.’ I was shocked myself. But there was a sparkle in his eyes that I’d never seen in a CEO before. And there he was, sort of turning left when everyone was turning right. In everything that he talked about, he was doing something extraordinarily different than conventional wisdom.”
When Rubenstein asked how his friends reacted when he chose to join Apple, Cook said, “They thought I was nuts. Conventional wisdom was, ‘You’re working for the top personal computer maker in the world. Why would you ever leave? You’ve got a great career ahead.’ It wasn’t a decision that you could sit down and do an engineering kind of analysis saying here are the pluses and here are the minuses. That analysis would always say, ‘Say put.’ It was this voice in your head saying, ‘Go west, young man. Go west.’”[iii]
I can relate to Cook. When I told Mike Thomas, Georgia Tech’s provost, that I was going to return to my undergraduate alma mater and be its chancellor, he said, “You’re making a big mistake. It’s a third-rate university in a third-rate state. You won’t be able to make a difference, and it’s going to break your heart.” I responded, “That’s even more reason why I have to go and do all I can to make a difference.” My decision was based on following my heart, not my head.
To his credit, three years later Thomas called me, said he was wrong, and he was very proud of me and what we were doing at the University of Arkansas. A University of Texas alumnus, Thomas sent a letter to the Governor of Texas, encouraging him to increase funding for Texas and Texas A&M because of what we were doing at Arkansas.
P.S. I couldn’t help but wonder how much Bezos relied on heart versus head when he decided to over-ride his editorial staff and not include a presidential endorsement in the Washington Post.
Next: Staffing a Leader
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[i] David M. Rubenstein, How to Lead: Wisdom from the World’s Greatest CEOs, Founders, and Game Changers, Simon & Schuster, New York, NY, 2020., p. 6.
[ii] Ibid, p. 7.
[iii] Ibid, p.165.
