Last Updated: March 30, 2026
This article originally appeared in The Tennessean.
Trust your gut or trust the data?
Way back before information was always at our fingertips, the “gut-trusters” ruled the world.
Business legends like Warren Buffett, Oprah Winfrey, Walt Disney, to name a few, relied on their intuition to succeed. They seemed to “just know” what to do — making big decisions with an eerie sixth sense as their guide.
And it worked. They trusted their guts to help them make the right decisions at the right times on their way to building successful companies.
But then along came the internet and a boatload of data, and the information age was born. And with it, the “trust the data” approach began to take shape.
These modern day “data geeks” take a more scientific approach, needing proof to support any decision they make. They make big decisions only after deep analysis that puts the odds in their favor for things to turn out as planned. And with the rapid onset of “big data,” business intelligence, cloud computing, and now AI—the numbers geeks are able to use objective statistics as their guide.
A few weeks ago, we started working on our company’s strategic plan. What services should we focus on? Will the economy be better or worse? How much should we spend on marketing? The list went on. These are big questions with big impacts on how we do business over the next few years.
