Intuitive Payoff

Many an envious businessman has suspected that his more successful competitors are gifted with a sixth sense--an intuitive ability to foresee the future and make the tough, unexpected decisions that pay off handsomely. Now there is some evidence of a sort that suggests intuition really does pay off.

At last week's meeting in Chicago of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, E. Douglas Dean presented the results of an unusual experiment. Dean, a research associate at the Newark College of Engineering, which is a center for studies of extrasensory perception, conducted a test of 67 high executives, mostly corporate presidents. He asked them to choose any number from zero to 9. They had to make the choice 100 different times, always picking a one-digit number. When the executives had finished their part of the experiment, an IBM computer, which was programmed to operate at random, also selected 100 numbers.

Each of the executives had one chance in ten of hitting the correct set of numbers; therefore an average guesser would have been right 10% of the time. As it turned out, the men who had managed to double their corporate profits in the past five years had an average score of 12.3%--substantially above the average. Meanwhile, the executives whose companies had reported relatively low profit gains or outright deficits scored only 8.3% on the guessing test.

Results were similar in a second test of 25 other chief executives. Dean reported that twelve of the men had doubled profits in the past five years; eleven of that group scored above 10% in the test. Of 13 men who had failed to double profits, seven scored below 10%.

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