Intuiting Innovation

     Steve Jobs' biography does a much better job of illustrating his international escapades as a young man than giving us insight into how Zen concepts played a role in his life, but there is one concept that stands out. When Jobs talks about his return to America after his time in India he describes the differences in how Eastern cultures think about human experience and he emphasizes the value of intuition.

"Coming back to America was, for me, much more of a cultural shock than going to India. The people in the Indian countryside don't use their intellect like we do, they use their intuition instead, and their intuition is far more developed than in the rest of the world. Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion." (Steve Jobs, p. 48)

     The high value Jobs places on intuition is evident in the products he made, and the role he played in the technology industry. Intellect is for the engineer, but intuition is for the artist. Jobs' ability to approach problems with a blank slate and use his artistic gut to develop his work is what put him ahead in the technology marketplace. Initially I thought that this intuition was simply a innate quality that Jobs' was born with and most other people don't have that sense about them, but Jobs hints that intuition is a skill like anything else and can be developed. Perhaps to be a truly great business man you need to cultivate your intuition and approach problems more like an artist than an engineer. Or maybe I just like that idea because I'm a musician.
     Shunryu Suzuki wasn't concerned with the business world, of course, but rather interpreting human experience. Below is a brief clip of his discussion on perception.

     This clip really struck me because Shunryu Suzuki asks you to look at the world in a different way. I believe that expanding our understanding of the world by bending our intellect, taking a different perspective on our surroundings and approaching life with a "beginner's mind" may be the way to developing our intuition. It's hard for me to tell how big of an impact these philosophies had on Jobs, but they might have been a major factor in his ability to develop the technology industry how he did. Perhaps the teachings of Suzuki aided him, or maybe he was always singing with the blue jay.