I've been thiking a lot about intuition lately. Here are some items from my notes . . .

• The president of a large restaurant chain headquartered in Vancouver, B.C., flabbergasted his underlings when he made the decision to build a restaurant in a rundown warehouse area, because he “had a good feeling” about the location. Two years later the new restaurant was the chain’s top moneymaker and the neighborhood around it was revitalized.

• The plant manager of a leading U.S. software company spent most of her time sitting at her desk doing paperwork. But every once in a while she got up from her desk and for reasons not clear to her, walked to a point on the production line and picked out a disk that appeared to be okay but proved to be flawed.

• Anita Roddick, founder and president of Body shop International, said: “No market research in the world is going to tell you why people don’t want to buy this product or why they love your company. But if you have your intuition working you can look at a huge marketing research report from the cosmetics industry and just know ‘This is wrong!’”

What about you? How often do you rely on feelings and intuition when making business decisions?