Essay On Deep Smart

It is undeniable that in the fast-evolving business context, the success of a company mainly lies on the distinct internal capabilities it possesses. We must have known a wide variety of sources of competitive advantages, such as rare tangible assets or proprietary intangible ones. Now, in the article “Deep Smarts” by Leonard and Swap (2004), we will have the chance to explore one special kind of these competitive advantage sources, which is hard to sustain, deep smarts.
“Deep smarts” could be defined as the ability to make brilliant decisions surprisingly quickly based on experts’ extensive experiences and gut intuition. Both technical and managerial deep smarts will be lost easily if the experts leave the company. This sort of competitive advantage, unfortunately, is hard to measure, recognize and transfer, especially in the case of managerial one. Therefore, in this article, through the research on Best Buy and its effort to enhance its innovation capabilities, Leonard and Swap try to show us what deep marts truly are and how to
transfer them from experts to novices. The transferring approach could be summarized into the four following paths: guided practice, guided observation, guided problem solving, and guided experimentation.
My first impression when reading this article is that it did somehow remind me of the article “Expertise in real world contexts” by Dreyfus.
and Dreyfus (2005) . Both consider the process of becoming an expert from a novice as the process of experimenting, learning from mistakes and then forming intuition. However, “Deep smarts” focuses more in business context and more specifically, managerial field. Leonard and Swap do not merely explore the expert formation process but provide us the tool to cultivate expertise and retain it within one organization. Moreover, from my perspective, the four-path-approach is a practical and effective coaching method which highly appreciate the interaction between the “pitcher” and the “catcher” as well as the learning-by-doing attitude. I believe that this approach is also very helpful for the successor program of any organization to prevent it from the repercussions of “baby-boom-retirement
tsunami”.
My only one concern on deep smart preservation is quite similar to the last part of the article, that is, is it worth to apply the full process of transferring deep smarts? I myself think “Do it or not?” is just a hard decision like any other ones which are possible to be answered by some decision making techniques, such as decision tree, risk preference or cost-benefit analysis. Therefore, the answer varies, depending on the viewpoint of the top management team on the values of deep smarts.
I have to say that I really like this article because the arguments of Leonard and Swap about deep smarts, from its definition, essence and transferring method, are logical, persuasive and applicable to a wide range of business contexts. In brief, the article has helped us to clearly know how an organization learns and preserves its precious intangible assets – deep smarts.