The JFK-led drive to put the first man on the moon remains one of the most astonishing and far-reaching accomplishments of humankind. In an excerpt from his recent book Strategic Intuition (Columbia University Press, Columbia Business School Publishing), William Duggan shows why nurturing the instinct to see and seize opportunity will always trump conventional notions of strategic planning for business and personal success.

America gave the world the philosophy of pragmatism and also its opposite.

Our pilot course on strategic intuition begins with students picking which statement they agree with more, A or B:

A: You can achieve anything you want if you believe in yourself, set clear goals, and work hard.

B: You can achieve many things if you prepare for opportunity, see it, and act on it.

Pragmatism and strategic intuition lead to B. But most students answer A. In workshops with business executives, army officers, and nonprofit leaders, the results are the same: A. Non-Americans tend to answer B more, but the longer they’ve been in America the more they seem to answer A.

Why is this? Once you think through A word by word, you cannot possibly agree with it. Where did this idea come from? It clearly has a strong appeal. There must be  something to it despite its apparent error.

The precise origin is very hard to pin down. In written form we can go back to Horatio Alger’s stories of poor boys rising in life through hard work, courage, virtue, and determination. Alger wrote dozens of these tales, from 1867 until his death in 1899. He was the most popular American author of his time. In most of his tales, a boy rises from nothing to a good job in a good company, usually with the help of a rich older man, as reward for some selfless deed. But we also find Alger’s 1881 biography of James A. Garfield, From Canal Boy to President, a true story of a poor boy who became the president of the United States. Overall Alger’s boys became folk heroes of the rags-to-riches, can-do American dream.

The tradition continues well into the twentieth century, with advice attached to the stories: Napoleon Hill’s Laws of Success (1928), Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking (1955), and Anthony Robbins’s Unlimited Power (1987). Robbins and his many imitators run popular workshops to drive the message home: with the right attitude and a lot of hard work, you can achieve anything you want. The good side of this tradition helps you develop a positive feeling about yourself and what you can achieve. The problem arises when you move from a feeling to actual strategy: your dreams must conform to reality, to the particular Karma you face.

Horatio Alger and his descendants endorse the can-do American spirit, but they did not invent it. The earliest source seems to be the legend of Columbus, our first great American dreamer. When the United States won its independence, a popular movement arose to rename the country “Columbia” in his honor versus the colonial name “America.” Columbus does stand out in the history of human achievement but for reasons very different from the legend itself.

Columbus dreamed of sailing west from Europe to Japan. Portuguese and Spanish scholars argued that he could not possibly do it. The scholars knew from astronomy the distance around the earth, and they knew from Marco Polo’s journals the distance from Spain to Japan. The scholars calculated that sailing west from Spain would take forty-five weeks to reach Japan. In those days a ship could carry supplies for only nine weeks of sailing. The scholars concluded, correctly, that Columbus would run out of supplies long before he completed the journey of forty-five weeks. Columbus did not listen. He presented his own calculations that showed Japan was only nine weeks away. Those calculations were wrong. But the Spanish king and queen sided with Columbus. After nine weeks at sea Columbus struck land. To his dying day he believed it was Japan. Despite his colossal error and blind luck, Columbus became the first hero of the great American dream.

Columbus serves as an amazing example of A, not B, in our opening exercise. But what does that tell us about human achievement? We find much to admire in his positive attitude and determination. But do we really want to ignore all evidence from past experience and set out across the ocean, hoping for an unknown continent to suddenly appear and save us?

The Columbus legend took off for another reason too. America became a prosperous place where poor Europeans found no feudal system to hold them down. The tremendous economic growth of America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries made these Europeans rich far beyond the prospects they left behind. Recent immigrants from other continents find the same thing. In America, for vast numbers of people, dreams really have come true.

A more recent version of the Columbus legend is President Kennedy’s race to the moon. He had an impossible dream. His determination made it come true. In his book The Moon and the Ghetto (1977) the economist Richard Nelson asked why America can’t achieve as much in the social realm. Thirty years later Nelson continues to work on the problem at the Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes. Nelson recalls:

Many years ago, I got interested in what people were then calling “the moon and the ghetto” problem. This was the commentary in the late 1960s: “If you can land a man on the moon, why can’t you solve the social problems of the ghetto?”

To answer this question we need to look back at the origin of Kennedy’s strategy. Did the idea for landing a man on the moon come from an ambitious dream, or was it yet another case of strategic intuition?

On May 25, 1961, after four months in office, Kennedy gave a speech on Urgent National Needs to both houses of Congress. He announced to them and to the world:

I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. . . . But . . . it will not be one man going to the moon — it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there.
 
And so began the Apollo program. It succeeded on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon.

That was six months ahead of Kennedy’s deadline. It was a thrilling example of a dream, a clear goal to make it come true, a great effort to reach the goal, and a success right on schedule. Surely this is A, not B.

But our study of strategic intuition gives us one more question to ask. Where did Kennedy get the idea? In the same speech to Congress he also said:

Recognizing the head start obtained by the Soviets with their large rocket engines, which gives them many months of lead-time, and recognizing the likelihood that they will exploit this lead for some time to come in still more impressive successes, we nevertheless are required to make new efforts. For while we cannot guarantee that we shall one day be first, we can guarantee that any failure to make this effort will find us last.

At the time of Kennedy’s speech the Soviet Union already had the goal of landing on the moon. As Kennedy said, the Soviets had many months of lead time. The Soviets sent the first object into orbit — Sputnik on October 4, 1957 — and the first human into space and into orbit — Yuri Gagarin on April 12, 1961. Two days after Gagarin’s flight the U.S. House Committee on Science and Astronautics called an urgent hearing. Here is an exchange between Congressman David King of Utah and Robert Seamans of NASA: 

KING: I understand the Russians have indicated at various times that their goal is to get a man on the moon and return safely by 1967, the fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Now specifically I would like to know, yes or no, are we making that a specific target date to try to equal or surpass their achievement?

SEAMANS: . . . our dates are for a circumlunar flight in 1967 and a target date for the manned lunar landing in 1969 and 1970.

KING: . . . then that outlines the issue very squarely. As things are now programmed we have lost.

Before Kennedy became president, NASA already had a plan to land on the moon, and the Saturn rocket was the means to get there. The German rocket scientist Werner von Braun developed the Saturn, starting in 1957. The plan to reach the moon advanced in the Eisenhower years. In January 1961, two weeks before Kennedy’s inauguration, George Low led a NASA team to lay out the steps in detail: one astronaut for a short earth orbit in 1961, three astronauts for longer orbits in 1965, three astronauts for a moon orbit in 1967, and a moon landing in 1968 – 1971. This was the timing that in the hearings King of Utah declared too late.

A few days after the hearings, Kennedy wrote a memo to his vice president, Lyndon Johnson, asking this:

1. Do we have a chance to beat the Soviets by putting a laboratory in space, or by a trip around the moon, or by a rocket to land on the moon, or by a rocket to go to the moon and back with a man? Is there any other space program which promises dramatic results in which we could win?

2. How much additional would it cost?

3. Are we working 24 hours a day on existing programs? If not, why not? If not, will you make recommendations to me as to how work can be speeded up?

In the end, Kennedy decided to go for the moon landing. He was clearly on a pragmatic search for the best combination of existing elements, especially the Saturn rocket.

A month and a day after his memo Kennedy made his big speech. He and NASA expected the Russians to get to the moon in 1967 and the United states two years later. Neither the goal to land on the moon nor the plan to get there was Kennedy’s idea. His speech was a request to Congress for extra funds to speed up the plan. Nobody knew at the time that the Soviet Union would miss their target and never reach the moon.

Kennedy did not dream the impossible dream. He brought forward elements from the past that showed the way to a reachable goal. He looked for a dramatic program where he had the means to succeed. It was a fine example of pragmatism in action. That’s B, not A, in our opening exercise.

Yet Kennedy’s move took personal courage, in line with Alfred Einstein’s advice to a young scientist: “One must develop an instinct for what one can just barely achieve through one’s greatest efforts.” Kennedy displayed that instinct, which we recognize now as strategic intuition. And Kennedy had the resolution to overcome the obstacles that stood in the way of achieving his goal.

The Columbus legend, the Alger stories, the immigrant dream, Kennedy’s race for the moon, and the writings of Hill, Peale, and Robbins all give you a positive message about striving for success. They inspire you to persevere and keep your chin up in the face of adversity. That’s good. But for strategy the popular understanding of these stories gives you the wrong idea. These stories imply that you can do anything and that when you do succeed it’s all because of you. It’s an appealing philosophy because it ignores all outside forces. When things go well you have only yourself to thank. But if you don’t achieve your dreams, you have only yourself to blame. When things go badly you go back to another Alger book or another Robbins workshop for another dose of the can-do spirit.

To rescue the can-do idea for strategy we convert our idea of America from a place where dreams come true to a land of opportunity. Of course these opportunities are limited and specific. If we could give the A – B exercise to Americans during the Great Depression, they would probably answer “neither.” It was not a time when you could achieve “anything you want” (A) or even “many things” (B). In those days you could achieve very few things. A few Americans, of course, achieved great success even then, but by finding specific opportunities and not by following their dreams.

Nelson’s question — If we can reach the moon, why can’t we solve social problems? — takes us back to the same answer as in our other examples of human achievement. You look to specific opportunities, not ambitious dreams, to find the way ahead. Progress follows where achievements take it, not where you want it to go. Evolution in nature works in a similar way, with no set direction beyond the sum of the adaptations of all the species on earth. But human achievement adds an extra element. Innovation in nature comes from a random gene mutation in new offspring, while in humans the innovation comes from a flash of insight in a specific human mind.

Progress in human affairs comes through opportunity, when someone sees it, seizes it, and turns it into reality. We cannot predict what opportunities will arise and whether anyone will see them, so we cannot predict the course of human progress. But at least we know how that progress works. Strategic intuition appears in and applies to a wide range of fields, through centuries and around the world. Flashes of insight tell a hidden story of human achievement. The opportunity for achievement arose not just as an opening, like a gap in the wall. It came as a combination of past elements that can fill the opening as well. Without those elements the opportunity does not exist.

William Duggan is associate professor of management at Columbia Business School. To learn more about this book, visit www.strategic-intuition.com.

Copyright 2007 by William Duggan. Reprinted by permission of Columbia University Press.