I found this quote to be one of particular interest.
“I couldn’t see it. It wasn’t one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought.”
…and, perhaps more importantly:
“The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I’ve ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut. My gut told me to say yes.”
I personally love data,facts,hard science, but I find too often many can ignore gut feelings. I almost always follow my gut instinct, It has proven itself to me over and over again even while taking what is often perceived as long shots but somehow my gut tells me "you got this".
In particular I would say gather your own data on how often or not your gut instinct is correct and use that as a data point in addition to the hard science, facts etc.
Instinct evolved to keep you alive, it is often wise to not ignore it.
I also thought this was a very important quote in today's world. Compare these two quotes:
> The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I’ve ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut. My gut told me to say yes.
vs. this famous quote from Jim Barksdale:
> If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.
Now that everyone is praying at the altar of big data, I find it important to keep both these quotes in mind. In my mind, it's not that the data is wrong, but too often I've seen attempts to interpret data it ways that can undercut long term planning and vision. For example, Steve Jobs had a famous saying about why Apple never put a ton of "xyz inside" stickers on the bottom of their laptop keyboards. It would have been easy to look at the data and say "Company pays us X million dollar to add this sticker, but only 0.001% of people decide not to buy us because of the sticker, so we should add the sticker." Judging the long term damage to your brand because you cover up your machines with crap is harder to put numbers to.
The average consumer probably thinks something along the lines "I have paid a lot of money for this phone. If intel had joined this market then they could have made a lot of money" when in reality intel would have gotten only a few dollars for every sold iPhone. Even if they produced ARM chips themselves and completely replaced Qualcomm they would only make $2.5 billion profit from $18 billion revenue. This is the best case scenario. In reality they probably wouldn't even make $1 billion in profit because of the how competitive the market is.
And regardless, while instincts are useful, I would rather analyze them and extract the underlying reasons for my instinctual reactions, rather than blindly acting on them at the emotional level. And at that point, I'm back to acting on data (though potentially drawing it from more sources, now).
In any case, to believe that your [survival] instincts are equally applicable to making sound business decisions is a bit silly, as that's pretty far removed from what they've been optimized to do.
I would agree, I find there are some that love to sort of just run around with a version of "I follow my instincts and thing turned out great, damn its good to be me!"
That's why I encourage people to actually keep track of such things and treat it as a single data point.
I would also say there is a difference between listening to your experience/confidence and listening to your ego. A lot of good things can go wrong because of Ego.
Beware survivor bias! Few people bother telling the stories where their gut was boringly wrong. That's going to make it hard even to gather data about yourself. I would say "listen to your gut" is a dangerous lesson to take from this anecdote.
“I couldn’t see it. It wasn’t one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought.”
…and, perhaps more importantly:
“The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I’ve ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut. My gut told me to say yes.”
I personally love data,facts,hard science, but I find too often many can ignore gut feelings. I almost always follow my gut instinct, It has proven itself to me over and over again even while taking what is often perceived as long shots but somehow my gut tells me "you got this".
In particular I would say gather your own data on how often or not your gut instinct is correct and use that as a data point in addition to the hard science, facts etc.
Instinct evolved to keep you alive, it is often wise to not ignore it.