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Interview with Gavin de Becker

Called the Slowest Pulse in Hollywood, Gavin de Becker has a cool style of executive and celebrity protection that has gained him the trust of Hollywood stars, CEOs and even U.S. presidents.

Interestingly for security professionals, the root of the word intuition, intere, means to guard and to protect. I think that is exactly what it can do for us when we listen. Every reader of your magazine can identify developments in their lives where intuition was a key playerwhere they knew something before they knew why they knew it. That's what intuition is. It's knowing without consciously knowing why. It is getting from A to Z without stopping at all the letters on the way.

Intuition is useful, but is it dangerous in business?

It can be, but remember that having an intuition and exploring it does not mean that you base your decisions solely on intuition. It means you follow your intuition to its logical destination. There's a lovely quote from the filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. He says, "I throw a spear into the jungle. That is my intuition. Then I go and find it. That is my intellect." Well, I recommend precisely that. You have the intuitive feeling. Don't discount it. Explore it. If it doesn't take you to a destination you're comfortable with, you don't have to proceed.

Do you think most CSOs have gotten where they are by intuition or by logic?

Absolutely by intuition. Most great investigators in law enforcement and in the military, where a lot of our CSOs come from, had an intuition time and again in their careers that said, I think I'll make that phone call again; I think I'll double-check on such and such; I'm going to look back over those records. They don't know why.

People who are closed to their intuition are disabling a massive component of who they are. I tell my employees to bring their entire self to work. I want their intuition. That said, I believe that America as a culture tends to prefer logic. We actually will praise someone for a bad decision if they can show us the logical route that got them there, and we will criticize someone for a good decision if they claim it was entirely made on intuition.

Our readers come from both the corporate security and the IT security worlds, and they are often at odds with each other. Do you think that may be because people with a technical background tend to have a more logical approach to their jobs?

Yes! Technically oriented people tend to expect the world to work like a machine: You put this in and you get this out. Being open to intuition places one more in tune with the natural ways of life (living beings as opposed to mechanical things). Paradoxically, intuition is, in the natural order of things, completely logical.