Trust Your Corporate Instinct!, by Thomas Koulopoulos

Corporate instinct is a corporation`s innate ability to react in the right way, despite the memory of how things have been done. It is an antidote for the chronic syndrome of past success. Corporate instinct allows a company to achieve repeated, extraordinary success, unshackled by its position, memory, and culture.

- Thomas Koulopoulos

When corporations act instinctively, they are acting beyond the confines of rational control, past memory, or systematic analysis; they are creating strategy from a collective reflex.

In its simplest form, the sixth sense I refer to is the collective wisdom that implicitly shapes strategic directions. An instinctive organization is influenced by the collective wisdom of its employees. In most organizations, that wisdom is fragmented and scattered throughout the company`s culture, systems, structures, procedures, and processes. For a company to tap into and intensify its corporate instinct, everyone must be able to access the organization`s collective wisdom. That can only occur when it is infused into the culture, systems, and structures of an organization. In a recent survey of 350 organizations, an incredible 50% claimed that good ideas were more likely to end up buried by bureaucracy or ignored. This perhaps explains why frustrated employees left to start new companies: the organization failed to capitalize on their ideas! Why? The culprit is a deeply-ingrained bureaucracy which stymies ideas that deviate from tradition and the belief that environmental stability can be controlled from within the organization.

Conversely, instinctive organizations let new ideas rush in. They allow new ideas to counteract old habits. By doing this, instinctive organizations are set apart from their competitors by adhering to three key rules: (1) they survive based on core competencies, not on core products; (2) they continuously compete with their own best ideas and make them obsolete; and, (3) they value the acquisition of new knowledge over the creation of corporate structure and standards. These three rules of corporate instinct are necessary components of any enterprise whose mission is to reach beyond the opportunistic success of a first product or the shortened life cycles of any single product or service.

Companies that lead have and use corporate instinct: they purposefully eclipse the success of yesterday`s products and develop new ones before a competitor inevitably does. Most importantly, they compete on their ability to operationalize new knowledge constantly -- not simply manage using knowledge already accumulated, perhaps too long ago.