Managing in the Gray
126
autobiography Sloan wrote, “The final act of business judg-
ment is, of course, intuitive.”
8
Notice the last three words in this statement. Sloan—the
brilliant, dedicated, lifelong analyst and systematizer—says
that intuition, not facts or analysis, is the pivotal factor in
making decisions. Notice also that Sloan says “of course.”
For him, the role of intuition was plain. His firm conviction
was that, in the end, the final, decisive factor for making seri-
ous decisions is an intuitive judgment—a hard-to-pin-down
fusion of a particular individual’s experience, character, and
perspective—that determines whether one course of action
is, in the end, better than another.
Sloan’s view is a humanist account of decision making.
And, remarkably, it is a perspective that Sloan shared, not just
with classical thinkers, but with the existentialists—the phi-
losophers, novelists, diarists, and poets who are the humanists
of our modern era. Some existentialists were deeply religious,
others were atheists; some were abstract thinkers, others
wrote plainly and concretely. In Europe, fifty years ago, many
existentialist thinkers were searching intensely for answers to
the deepest questions—about life and its meaning—in the
aftermath of the terrible wars and unthinkable barbarism on
European and Asian soil.
The existentialists understood the inevitability, finality,
and burden of choice. They grasped what men and women
with real responsibility in life know from experience. Choice
and commitment are inevitable and inescapable, particularly
in the face of fluid, complex, uncertain problems. Making
these decisions is sometimes a heavy burden, sometimes a
bracing challenge, and always a profoundly human task.
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127
Intuition and judgment enable us to meet this challenge.
In other words, the critical, final moment in making hard
decisions is a partly conscious, partly unconscious melding
of mind and heart, analysis and instinct. A well-respected
senior executive described his own version of this approach to
difficult decisions by saying, “I wouldn’t go ahead with some-
thing just because my brain told me it was the right thing to
do. I also had to feel it. If I didn’t, I had to get my brain and
my gut into harmony.”
Practical Challenges
Despite its commanding legacy, the fifth question seems to
have a significant or fatal flaw, especially if we think about it
in everyday, concrete terms. Do we really want to rely heavily
on whatever course of action a decision maker can live with?
Do we really want the pivotal consideration on hard, high-
stakes decisions to be whatever someone in charge somehow
“feels” is right? What if this person is lazy, incompetent,
sleazy, pervasively self-interested, corrupt, or just having a
bad day?
Ernest Hemingway gave a clear example of this danger
when he wrote, “About morals, I know only that what is
moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is
what you feel bad after.”
9
This suggests that hard decisions
are basically personal, subjective, a matter of feelings and
emotions, and hence arbitrary. It says that, if the great savages
of history, like Hitler and Stalin, felt good about what they
did, then they were moral.
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128
Hemingway’s view is profoundly challenging. It asks, in
effect: What do we have to show for century after century of
serious thinking about the right way to make hard decisions?
The answer seems to be: not much. No single approach or
school or theory has won out. All we have is a record of end-
less, sometimes brilliant, sometimes ponderous disputation.
We can admire the intellectual fireworks, but we don’t find
a firm foundation we can stand on—and this is troubling. It
suggests that men and women in positions of power have no
objective principles to follow when they make final choices. A
statement by the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre—“If
God does not exist, all is permitted”—is a famous and dis-
turbing version of this view.
10
The fifth question also seems hazardous in a second way.
It assumes we can actually know who we are. But do we?
There are some very good reasons, which we can discover
in the wisdom of ancient writers or by self-reflection, for
thinking that it is very difficult, perhaps almost impossible,
to know who we are. Self-understanding is a central human-
ist concern, and serious thinkers have grappled with it for
millennia. The Oracle of Delphi in ancient Greece welcomed
visitors with the command “Know thyself.” This precept was
etched in stone above the temple entrance, and it appears,
again and again, in the works of a wide range of thinkers.
But this advice is usually accompanied with warnings.
In Poor Richard’s Almanac, for example, Benjamin Franklin
wrote, “There are three things extremely hard: steel, a dia-
mond, and to know one’s self.”
11
As we have seen, a great deal
of sophisticated, contemporary research suggests that we don’t
even have stable, enduring selves—in so many situations, in
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129
laboratories, in real life, and in history—the power of situa-
tions has overwhelmed the “true selves” of most people. And a
good deal of classic literature shows how often and how easily
we betray whatever true self we have. Shakespeare described
the problem in mocking tones in Measure for Measure, where
he wrote:
But man, proud man,
Dressed in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angels weep.
12
These challenges to the fifth question seem to undermine
the basic theme of this book: the idea that men and women
should approach gray area issues as managers and resolve
them as human beings. One challenge is that human beings
can be distracted, ill informed, negligent, lazy, deeply self-
interested, or outright evil. The other is that it can be very
hard to understand who we really are and what we really
care about. Perhaps the fifth question should simply be
reserved for inspirational occasions, like patriotic events and
commencement addresses.
But that isn’t a real option. In one form or another, the fifth
question is inescapable. When individuals or organizations
face hard problems, the process of analysis has to come to an
end. At some point, someone has to make a decision. And,
if the facts and the framing are unclear, the person making
the decision will have discretion. The decision will reflect this
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130
person’s judgment and—as so many important thinkers have
told us—their judgment will reflect, in significant ways, who
they are and what they can live with. In short, for gray area
issues, personal judgment is inevitable and decisive, and char-
acter inevitably shapes it—for well and ill.
Practical Guidance: Tempered Intuition
The practical guidance for the fifth question is surprising.
It seems to depart, at least initially, from Alfred Sloan’s view
that intuition is the final and decisive step in making hard
decisions. But that is because we sometimes see intuition as a
little bird that alights on our shoulder and whispers the truth.
This is a charming, but profoundly misleading notion—at
least for managers facing gray areas. What they need and
what Sloan recommended is intuition that has been tem-
pered and tested, not spontaneous.
Tempered intuition requires a period of deliberation. That
is the clear suggestion of familiar expressions like “turning
something over in your mind.” It is the rationale for the
advice to “sleep on it” before making a decision. It is the rea-
son that many of the great religious traditions recommend
specific, often extended practices, like the Spiritual Exercises
of St. Ignatius of Loyola, as preparation for life and its serious
choices.
13
In other words, tempered intuition isn’t instanta-
neous insight. It reflects a process of consideration, reflection,
and deliberation in the mind and heart of the person who has
to make a hard decision.
The practical guidance in this chapter is for the period just
before you make a decision about a gray area problem. When
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