The choice is not between hands-on or hands-off. In our research, the entrepreneurs who led their companies from start-ups into some of the greatest corporations in history generally had both a hands-on style and an empowering style. No matter how big their companies became, they remained closely connected to their people, hyper-aware of facts on the ground, and directly engaged in strategic imperatives. If you lose your voracious curiosity about tactical details, if you lose passionate interest in people and how they are feeling, if you insulate yourself in the protective cocoon of executive comforts, you may well wake up one day to discover your company has already entered a doom loop of decline and self-destruction.

My goal was to make employees feel like owners and, in turn, to increase the amount of responsibility they took for the company’s success. However, opening company secrets to employees had another outcome: it made our workforce smarter. When you give low-level employees access to information that is generally reserved for high-level executives, they get more done on their own. They work faster without stopping to ask for information and approval. They make better decisions without needing input from the top.

In most businesses, without even realizing it, senior managers stunt the abilities and intelligence of their own workforce by keeping financial and strategic information hidden. Although just about all companies talk about empowering staff, in the vast majority of organizations, real empowerment is a pipe dream because employees aren’t given enough information to take ownership of anything.

I was also told that a brand-new CEO shouldn’t be trying to make huge acquisitions. I was “crazy,” as one of our investment bankers put it, because the numbers would never work out and this was an impossible “sale” to the street.

The banker had a point. It’s true that on paper the deal didn’t make obvious sense. But I felt certain that this level of ingenuity was worth more than any of us understood or could calculate at the time. It’s perhaps not the most responsible advice in a book like this to say that leaders should just go out there and trust their gut, because it might be interpreted as endorsing impulsivity over thoughtfulness, gambling rather than careful study. As with everything, the key is awareness, taking it all in and weighing every factor—your own motivations, what the people you trust are saying, what careful study and analysis tell you, and then what analysis can’t tell you. You carefully consider all of these factors, understanding that no two circumstances are alike, and then, if you’re in charge, it still ultimately comes down to instinct. Is this right or isn’t it? Nothing is a sure thing, but you need at the very least to be willing to take big risks. You can’t have big wins without them.

How someone can see what others have not, or what they have ignored, and thereby discover a pivotal objective and create an advantage, lies at the very edge of our understanding, something glimpsed only out of the corner of our minds. Not every good strategy draws on this kind of insight, but those that do generate the extra kick that separates “ordinary excellence” from the extraordinary.

Howard Schultz envisioned an Italian espresso bar in Seattle. He tested this hypothesis and found it wanting. But the test produced additional information, so he modified his hypothesis and retested. After hundreds of iterations, the original hypothesis has long since vanished, replaced by a myriad of new hypotheses, each covering some aspect of the growing, evolving business. This process of learning—hypothesis, data, anomaly, new hypothesis, data, and so on—is called scientific induction and is a critical element of every successful business.