Managing in the Gray
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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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