Big business in seeing the future of business

“You hear a lot of people say you can’t predict the future, and I’m here to tell you you can,” Anderson said.

Glen Hiemstra, a public speaker and founder of futurist.com, a consulting firm, remembers talking about global warming as early as 1987, long before Al Gore and his cohorts prompted widespread interest. Canton was saying networked Internet communications would change the world as early as 1994, even though by 1998 at least one major corporate client still didn’t want to hear it.

On the other hand, Canton also thought that the health care industry would have embraced advanced technology for recording and sharing patient information by now and says he did not accurately forecast how resistant doctors and others would be to giving up the traditional paper file system.

Hiemstra told people in the early 1990s that he believed the traditional, gas-powered auto  would largely be replaced by cars running on hybrid engines and other alternative fuel sources by 2010 at the latest. Now he sees that “gasoline still has a little bit of a run.” Anderson thought for sure that broadband Internet would experience a huge boost in popularity — around 1996, half-a-dozen? years before it actually happened.

The business of financial forecasting, in particular, also has its share of schoolyard peer pressure. While some forecasters delight in making off-the-wall predictions, for many it can be tough going against the grain.

Baker, the economist, who said he normally stays out of the forecasting business, has been doggedly predicting a housing bust since as early as 2002 or 2003, even when few agreed with him. He took a similarly unpopular view about a stock market downturn beginning in the late 1990s and was eventually vindicated.

Among leading economists, there is rarely a huge amount of dissension, Baker says, because “if you’re wrong the way everyone else is wrong, no one holds it against you.”

Baker, who confesses to using the same excuse himself once or twice, also says forecasters are guilty of defending predictions gone wrong by pointing to unexpected changes. People can talk about prevailing economic theories, Baker said, but “the predominant school in economics is the ‘who could have known’ school.”

For some businesses, Baker sees forecasting as a kind of security blanket, giving companies assurance that they are getting expert guidance — and providing a convenient foil if the company makes a bad bet based on those predictions.

Saffo agrees, noting that it is likely one reason why you can now find predictions for almost anything, ranging from the market for cell phone ring tones to the projected revenue for an obscure type of software.

“We love the future, but we hate uncertainty, and people will do anything they can to reduce uncertainty,” Saffo said.

Saffo, by the way, thinks that logic is flawed. “A business person should love uncertainty because uncertainty means opportunity,” he said.

It also can be tough to keep believing in something that even your clients — the people who pay you — either don’t want to hear or doubt is true. Canton remembers how unhappy an insurance agency was in the 1990s when he told executives they would have to rethink their entire pricing model because of increasing demands for, and access to, information about how such prices are set.

“People pay us to tell the truth,” he said. “It’s not always welcome.”

Still, sticking with your guns, and proclaiming it loudly, can score the biggest victories.

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