GoKawiil
Tech News
Recounting career-defining moments to graduate students, business leaders repeatedly described relying on intuitive signals rather than data-driven logic when making pivotal decisions, such as choosing collaborators or walking away from deals. The observation, drawn from years of dinners hosted by a former strategic design MBA program director, highlights a form of 'sensemaking' that isn't rooted in rational analysis.
Robby Stein, Google's vice president of product for Search, will join a fireside chat at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, running October 13-15 at Moscone West in San Francisco. The session, titled 'From MVP to Billions of Users,' will examine how product teams manage the shift from early-stage experimentation to decision-making at massive scale.
Researchers recording brain activity directly from six people found two adjacent regions in the orbitofrontal cortex that compete during risky decisions, described in a Nature Neuroscience study published September 15. One region activates when a person leans toward pursuing a reward, while the other activates when they lean toward avoiding risk, with signals rapidly alternating between the two before a final choice is made.
Processes originally created to solve a specific business problem can outlive their usefulness, becoming bottlenecks rather than safeguards. Leaders frequently continue enforcing these procedures long after the original risk has faded, mistaking the fact that a process once worked for proof it remains necessary today.
A commentary piece argues that common sense functions like a muscle that weakens from disuse, and asks why practical judgment is so rare in modern workplaces. The piece suggests organizational structures and processes may be crowding out employees' basic instincts and reasoning.
A leadership guidance piece argues that the toughest calls executives face aren't really about missing information but about competing values pulling in different directions. It recommends leaders conduct a personal 'values inventory'—systematically identifying and ranking their core priorities—to clarify decision-making when facts alone don't point to an answer.
A contributor argues that enterprise AI pilots often succeed technically but fail to change business outcomes because they operate alongside existing workflows rather than inside them. The piece traces this to fragmented, inconsistent decision-making processes across teams, which limits how much impact any AI system can have once deployed.
An entrepreneur in a heavily regulated industry describes ending a working relationship with a co-manufacturer whose product quality was fine but whose process records were inconsistent depending on who compiled them. Replacing the supplier took weeks and unbudgeted funds, but the founder argues the real lesson was building a habit of decisions that survive outside scrutiny, not just internal convenience.
An entrepreneur behind more than 22 companies at DRC Ventures argues that corporate values only matter when tested by hard trade-offs, not when displayed as slogans. He describes turning mission statements into operational filters that guide daily decisions on suppliers, partnerships and deals, even when a less principled option would be easier or more profitable.