Without intuition, a nation risks losing its sense of direction. Without logic, even the noblest vision can produce unintended consequences. Recent public initiatives in Indonesia—including the Free Nutritious Meals program (MBG) and the Merah Putih Village Cooperative initiative (KDMP) —illustrate how ambitious ideas, however well intentioned, ultimately depend on disciplined execution as much as visionary leadership.
By Anshar A. Rahman*
“Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
— Steve Jobs
MARITIMEPOSTS.COM – Modern leadership has long been built on a simple assumption: the best decisions emerge from data, analysis, and logic. The more information we gather, the wiser our choices become.
Great leaders, we are told, are rational thinkers who rely on evidence rather than feeling. Whether in corporate boardrooms, executive committees, or the halls of government, decisions earn credibility when they can be justified by numbers, projections, and sophisticated analytical models.
Yet leadership presents a paradox that becomes increasingly apparent as one rise to positions of greater responsibility. The higher the office, the more often a leader must decide before the data can fully explain reality. There comes a point when numbers fall silent. Charts offer no clear answer. Reports can only describe the past, while leaders are expected to shape the future.
That is when an age-old question returns: Should a leader trust logic—or feeling?
We live in an era that celebrates rationality. From our earliest years in school, we are taught that every correct answer must be supported by proof. As we enter the professional world, we learn to build business cases, quantify risks, develop forecasts, and defend our conclusions with facts. These disciplines are indispensable. No organization can thrive on feeling alone.
But logic, for all its strengths, has limits. Not everything that truly matters can be measured. And not everything that can be measured truly matters.
History repeatedly reminds us that some of humanity’s most transformative decisions were born not from spreadsheets but from a leader’s willingness to listen to something less tangible—an inner conviction, a feeling, an intuition.
A compelling example is Kiichiro Toyoda’s decision to build Japan’s own automobile industry from the ground up.
At the time, there was no comprehensive market analysis proving such an ambitious venture would succeed. The decision could not be fully justified by financial models or mathematical certainty. It began with intuition.
Only afterward did rigorous logic take over.
Toyota’s engineers tested relentlessly. They embraced trial and error, learned from repeated failures, refined every component, reduced production costs without sacrificing quality, secured investment, and searched tirelessly for markets around the world. Intuition pointed toward the destination; disciplined execution built the road that led there.
Today, Toyota stands as one of the world’s most respected automotive manufacturers, exporting millions of vehicles across the globe. The vision may have started with intuition, but it was logic, perseverance, and systematic execution that transformed that intuition into one of the greatest industrial success stories in modern history.
An article about feeling would be incomplete without a personal story.
Early in my professional career, I encountered a moment that permanently shaped my understanding of leadership. At the time, a national telecommunications project was divided into four major regions: Sumatra, Kalimantan, Central Java, and Eastern Indonesia. Local companies were required to form joint operations with leading international telecom operators, each consortium free to choose the region it wished to pursue.
The choice seemed obvious to everyone—except me.
Not a single consortium wanted Eastern Indonesia. Even our Singaporean partner insisted that we focus only on Sumatra and Central Java, believing those regions offered the strongest commercial prospects. Among all the executives involved, I was the only one who argued—firmly and repeatedly—that we should submit a bid for Eastern Indonesia.
My conviction was driven by something I could not fully quantify.
Of course, I presented logical arguments as well. Bukaka’s principal owners, Fadel Muhammad and Jusuf Kalla, both came from Eastern Indonesia. At the time, Fadel Muhammad was the more publicly recognized figure because of his high-profile public presence, but I believed the company’s roots gave it a unique affinity with the region.
More importantly, I had a strong conviction that Eastern Indonesia would one day emerge as one of the country’s most dynamic engines of growth.
The data available at the time did not fully support that belief. My intuition did. The decision was anything but easy.
It took intense debate, persistent persuasion, and the support of one senior executive before our joint-operation consortium finally agreed to conduct a field survey and submit a formal bid for Eastern Indonesia.
The outcome surprised everyone.
Because virtually every international operator had dismissed the region as commercially unattractive, our consortium became the only bidder. Even then, our initial proposal was deliberately conservative, reflecting the widespread belief that Eastern Indonesia simply lacked economic potential.
By conventional business logic, the skeptics had a compelling case. The market appeared too small, the infrastructure too limited, and the commercial risks too high. On paper, the investment looked difficult to justify.
Reality, however, had a different story to tell.
As a frontier market, Eastern Indonesia evolved into the fastest-growing region in the entire project. Revenue expanded at an extraordinary pace, profitability consistently exceeded expectations, and while more established regions gradually approached saturation, Eastern Indonesia continued to generate fresh opportunities.
The project ultimately delivered substantial profits. More importantly, it helped stabilize our publicly listed parent company during a period of severe market pressure and later contributed to financing the prestigious renewable energy project in Poso.
Looking back, that experience reinforced a lesson I have never forgotten: markets do not always reveal their future through historical data. Sometimes they reveal it only to those willing to imagine what they might become.
The project’s success also transformed public perception within the Bukaka Group. Increasingly, people came to recognize Jusuf Kalla as the company’s principal driving force.
His vision of encouraging Indonesians to “Look East” resonated with the nation’s growing awareness of Eastern Indonesia’s strategic importance. In the years that followed, he would go on to serve as a cabinet minister and, ultimately, twice as Vice President of Indonesia.
The same dynamic often unfolds at the level of national leadership.
Many public policies begin with a noble intention and an intuitive understanding of where a nation ought to go. A leader may instinctively recognize that future generations require greater investment in education, healthcare, or human capital. From both a moral and long-term strategic perspective, that instinct may be entirely correct.
Yet vision alone is never enough.
A compelling vision must be translated into sound strategy, supported by credible data, fiscal discipline, effective governance, resilient supply chains, capable institutions, and rigorous oversight. This is where the delicate balance between intuition and logic becomes indispensable.
Intuition helps leaders identify the right destination.
Logic ensures they can actually get there.
Without intuition, a nation risks losing its sense of direction. Without logic, even the noblest vision can produce unintended consequences. Recent public initiatives in Indonesia—including the Free Nutritious Meals program (MBG) and the Merah Putih Village Cooperative initiative (KDMP) —illustrate how ambitious ideas, however well intentioned, ultimately depend on disciplined execution as much as visionary leadership.
Leadership, therefore, is not measured merely by the ability to imagine a better future. It is measured by the ability to transform that vision into reality through the patient, disciplined work of implementation.
There is another initiative introduced by President Prabowo and his cabinets that deserves careful attention: the proposal for a single-gateway export system. I see it as a vision born from strategic intuition—one that must ultimately be tested against the disciplines of public policy and economic reality.
The intuition behind the idea is not difficult to understand.
Indonesia is extraordinarily rich in natural resources. Yet for decades, much of the value generated by international trade—commodity marketing, trade finance, logistics, maritime insurance, and a wide range of supporting services—has flowed not to Indonesia itself but to regional commercial hubs, most notably Singapore.
Viewed through the lens of economic nationalism, the question is both legitimate and compelling: Why should a country that produces so much of the world’s raw wealth capture only a fraction of the value created along the global supply chain?
From that perspective, the aspiration to regain greater control over Indonesia’s export value chain is entirely understandable. But intuition is only the beginning.
Logic must answer the far more difficult questions. Will a single-gateway export system strengthen Indonesia’s bargaining power in global markets? Possibly. Will it automatically redirect the economic value currently captured by Singapore back to Indonesia? Not necessarily.
Singapore did not become one of Asia’s premier trading hubs simply because of government policy.
Its position was built patiently over decades through the creation of an integrated commercial ecosystem: world-class ports, a trusted legal system, internationally respected financial institutions, sophisticated commodity markets, maritime insurance, trade finance, commercial arbitration, and one of the world’s most business-friendly regulatory environments.
In global commerce, the greatest value often lies not in the goods themselves, but in the services that surround them. That is precisely where the real challenge lies.
If Indonesia merely centralizes export administration without simultaneously developing the supporting ecosystem, the country may succeed only in relocating paperwork rather than relocating economic value.
For the policy to become a genuine strategic instrument of national development, it must be accompanied by a comprehensive institutional transformation.
First, Indonesia needs a credible and transparent national commodity exchange capable of establishing internationally recognized benchmark prices rather than relying on foreign trading centers.
Second, its ports and logistics networks must become competitive with regional hubs in both cost and operational efficiency.
Third, the country’s trade finance, insurance, and financial services industries must be strengthened so that exporters are no longer dependent on overseas institutions for critical commercial services.
Fourth, downstream industrialization must become an inseparable part of the strategy. Nations rarely become prosperous by exporting raw materials alone. Sustainable wealth is created by exporting products with significantly higher added value.
Finally, governance must remain exceptionally transparent. The more centralized a system becomes, the greater the risks of inefficiency, monopolistic behavior, and abuse of authority if accountability mechanisms are weak.
As for Singapore, I do not believe it would remain passive if such a policy were to materially reshape regional trade flows. Nor do I expect confrontation.
Singapore has consistently demonstrated that its greatest competitive advantage lies not in defending the past, but in adapting to the future. Faced with structural change, it would likely strengthen precisely those areas that are most difficult to replicate—global finance, derivatives trading, sophisticated logistics, commercial advisory services, and other high-value segments of the regional economy.
Ultimately, Indonesia’s challenge is not to defeat Singapore. The real challenge is to build the institutional capabilities that Indonesia itself has yet to fully develop. History teaches us that nations rarely rise by weakening their competitors. They rise by strengthening themselves.
Many of history’s greatest ideas were born from a leader’s intuition—a quiet conviction about a future that others could not yet see. But history also teaches us that intuition can only point the way. What ultimately determines success is disciplined reasoning, thoughtful policy design, cross-functional integration, and relentless execution.
A leader may begin the journey with feeling. But no leader can complete it by intuition alone. In national leadership, intuition shapes the vision; logic determines whether that vision ultimately translates into prosperity for the people.
This balance has become even more critical in today’s organizations. Many companies are led by individuals of exceptional intellectual ability yet limited feeling intuition.
They can dissect financial statements with remarkable precision but fail to recognize the morale of their own teams. They understand business strategy but overlook the people responsible for executing it.
The consequences are subtle but profound.
Organizations become more efficient while gradually losing their soul. Performance targets are achieved, yet trust erodes. Productivity rises, but loyalty quietly disappears.
I encountered another illustration of this principle in my own professional career. At one company where I served in a leadership role, a business unit was facing severe market pressure. Sales had been declining steadily, margins were shrinking, volumes were falling, and competitors were becoming increasingly aggressive. Every financial indicator pointed to the same conclusion: the business was no longer worth saving.
From a purely analytical perspective, shutting it down appeared to be the most rational decision.
Yet my intuition told me the story was not over.
Chief Officers at both the holding company and the corporate level decided that the loss-making unit should be phased out. Having recently assumed responsibility for the division, however, I felt there was still life beneath the disappointing numbers.
The financial reports failed to capture several realities that I believed were strategically important: customers remained deeply loyal to our brand, our people possessed valuable capabilities, the sales incentive system had long discouraged performance rather than rewarded it, and significant market opportunities remained largely untapped.
Rather than preparing the organization for closure, I challenged our sales (and operational) teams to think differently. I told them we were not witnessing the end of a business—we were being asked to save a ship that was taking on water. At the same time, we improved an incentive that had been neglected for years.
My intuition then led me beyond the spreadsheets and into the marketplace itself. Field visits revealed something the reports had overlooked: despite our disappointing sales, our products remained competitively priced for end users. Soon afterward, circumstances shifted unexpectedly.
Several competitors were forced to raise prices significantly after unsustainable pricing practices could no longer be maintained.
What followed was not a miracle, nor merely good fortune.
It was a reminder that leadership sometimes requires the courage to see possibilities before they become visible in the data. Once the underlying conditions changed, our sales rebounded dramatically, validating a conviction that had initially rested more on informed intuition than on conventional analysis. True leadership, therefore, is never about choosing between logic and intuition. It is about mastering the discipline of balancing both.
Perhaps this is what Steve Jobs meant in the quotation that opens this essay when he spoke of having the courage to follow one’s heart and intuition. It was never because he underestimated logic. Apple could never have become one of the world’s most valuable companies through intuition alone.
Rather, Jobs understood something that many leaders overlook: Transformational innovation almost always appears before the evidence can fully justify it.
No customer survey ever asked Apple to invent the iPhone before it existed. No market forecast guaranteed its success. What existed instead was an intuitive conviction that the world was moving toward a future that few others could yet imagine.
That is where leadership meets courage.
For the most consequential decisions a leader will ever make are rarely taken in complete certainty. There is always ambiguity. There is always risk. There are always dimensions of reality that remain beyond the reach of data.
It is within that uncertainty that the human heart finds its purpose.
There is, however, one final truth that deserves reflection. The clearer a person’s heart, the more trustworthy his or her intuition becomes. The greater the ego, the more distorted that inner compass is likely to be.
Perhaps this is the deepest lesson of leadership. Leadership is not merely the cultivation of intellectual excellence. It is also the lifelong discipline of refining one’s inner character, for it is within that inner life that history’s most consequential decisions are first conceived.
The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) taught:
“Indeed, Allah does not look at your appearance or your wealth, but He looks at your hearts and your deeds.”
The saying reminds us that leadership begins long before one leads an organization. A leader must first learn to lead oneself. Leadership is not simply about managing numbers. It is about stewarding one’s conscience with the same discipline applied to strategy, finance, and execution.
In the end, leadership is not a contest between logic and feeling. It is the wisdom to bring both into harmony.
___
The Author is a Strategic Leader in Kalla Group
