I’ve always felt that we should revisit, at year’s end, every economic prognostication made for that year and compare the prediction vs. the results. Every economic forecaster who was seriously off base should be fired. Let’s call it something unique, say, ah, “payback for performance.”
But we don’t do that, we allow wide discrepancies to exist because we really believe that no one knows what they’re talking about, and we’re just guessing which guesser to go with. (At the track once I was informed by an inveterate gambler that he knew the races were fixed, but he was still gambling on which horses were being manipulated, which didn’t change the basic principle. I was too stunned to reply.)
If a weather forecaster occasionally gets one wrong, blame it on the vagaries of cold fronts or isobars. But if the forecaster is wrong most of the time, blame it on incompetence and send her to San Diego where, boringly, the weather forecast never changes from day to day and my dog could get it right as long as the kibbles are on the computer keyboard.
We should think about human resources, training, and organization development in the same way. Whose book was accurate and who blew smoke through 300 pages? (Drucker was right about strategy, emotional intelligence is still awaiting the jury results, and “open meetings” is pure hokum.) Unfortunately, most of the quadrillions of words written in these areas fall under the phenomenon: “predicted the market would fall by 300 points and it went up by 1,000.”
Why are we still reading, listening, and putting up with these people? Why do we hire “experts” whose predictions and formulas last about as long as snow on hot asphalt? They’re wrong about quite a few things, but they come back with some more stuff, and we engage them once again. And we wonder why there is skepticism among line clients!
Look at a training company’s track record. Have they produced genuine skills-building programs as measured by sound criteria, or do they merely create classroom experiences based on the latest academic’s book? Inquire into a consultant’s references. Do they concur that he or she has brought new intellectual capital and helped attain new levels of performance, or have they merely introduced an arbitrary “model” and taken the money and run? Find out about the speaker’s content and contributions. Are they based on pragmatic work for other firms, or are they merely a collection of stories and anecdotes gleaned from other sources?
Prognosticators and those who promise new results from new ideas should be honored and revered if they are accurate most of the time. But they don’t deserve a twelfth chance if the first eleven have been worthlessly inaccurate and unhelpful. Don’t be impressed by the “sizzle,” find out if there is “steak.”
Otherwise, I can forecast that it’s going to rain on your parade.
Alan Weiss, Ph.D. is the author of 25 books, including Million Dollar Consulting (McGraw-Hill), which appear in 7 languages. He runs the unique Million Dollar Consulting™ Colleges three times a year. You can reach him at http://www.summitconsulting.com, where you can also download hundreds of free articles. He was recently inducted into the Professional Speakers Hall of Fame.®
