Large companies have spent heavily on data teams over the past decade. Many of their biggest decisions still start with a hunch. Alejandro Betancourt López, who chairs the sunglasses maker Hawkers, does not see the two as rivals.
“I think everything I do is based on intuition and information,” he explained in an interview. “Intuition based on the right information and the right people that surrounds you.”
What Executives Say They Rely On
A 2014 global survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit and PwC asked 1,135 senior executives how they make big decisions. Seventy-nine percent said they make one at least once a quarter. Nearly one in three put the value of those decisions at $1 billion or more, FM Magazine reported.
Only one in three executives described their company as highly data-driven. That group was three times more likely to report solid improvement in decision-making over the prior two years.
Alejandro Betancourt López’s Inputs
His version of intuition depends on where he spends his time. “If I go to a bar to get drunk every time and every night, I’m not going to get good intuition and no good information,” Alejandro Betancourt said. Alejandro Betancourt López described the opposite case in the same answer. “If I go to the right places and I interact with the right people, I’m going to get good information,” he said. “My intuition is going to be more tuned up, and better.”
“You have to surround yourself with people that are at top of their game,” he said. “It’s a mix of surrounding yourself with good, talented people, listening to them, and then putting that intuition of yours into good work.”
He keeps the process plain, with no elaborate scoring model of his own. “I’m very logical. I try not to make things complex,” he said of the way he weighs new business decisions. He believes he has “a good sense of knowing or perceiving what is going to be the next cycle of profitable businesses.”
His check on instinct is other people. That group includes the operating teams at Hawkers, Auro and Playtomic, the companies his résumé lists among his main holdings, along with the managers he hires to run each one.
The survey points the same direction. Executives at the most data-driven companies reported the biggest gains in decision quality. Experience still counted.