Psychic Friends Get The Call From Corporate America

We're jumping into the marketing fray because we feel compelled to comment on things like this....

Parking lots and psychics—those are the businesses to be in these days. According to an article by Tony Dokoupil in Newsweek, companies are shelling out $10,000 plus a month for psychic insights into how to grow their businesses and where to make investments. Of course, they don’t call themselves psychics—no, no. They’ve been “rebranded as ‘intuitionists’ or ‘mentalists’—terms more palatable to mainstream America.” Though the individuals who wax poetic about their positive experiences employing corporate psychics to guide important business decisions, Dokoupil notes, “almost all who spoke to Newsweek also requested anonymity out of concern for their reputations.” Ya, you think?

One ‘mentalist’ profiled in the article Jon Stetson can’t believe his luck [frankly, neither can we] that “after years of performing on cruise ships and in the ‘saddest’ comedy clubs, he now has a Rolodex of businesses, including Fortune 500 companies, that call him for Intuition Workshops—which differ in name only, he says, from psychic workshops.” Another ‘intuitionist,’ Laura Day, author of New York Times best-seller Practical Intuition, regularly trains members of the Harvard Business School Network of Women Alumnae to develop their psychic prowess. Psychic abilities aside, these folks certainly can smell an opportunity (or a sucker) a mile away.

Three points here:

1. This isn’t new! OK, maybe ‘mentalist’ and ‘intuitionists’ making as much as McKinsey and Bain senior partners IS new, but relying on intuition to guide decisions has been acceptable business practice for more than 20 years.
2. The power of intuition is a myth. People in business make gigantic, multi-million—sometimes even billion—dollar decisions every day based on little more than a hunch. The question is how many times do pure hunches alone lead to legendary success? The answer is: pretty rarely.
3. Even psychics have a disclaimer. Sure, we’d all like to be able to see into the future, but even psychics concede “the future is never set in stone.” Laura Day admits she doesn’t always make accurate predictions. Where are the statistics on her success ratio? What’s the ROI on most of her recommendations? We suspect that corporate psychics are wrong most of the time. Ideas grounded in junk science and psychobabble lead companies in the wrong direction much more often than not.
   

Aside from the utter lunacy of a business hiring a psychic for anything other than entertainment at the company halloween party, we’re concerned that when business folk want to make sense of uncertainty in the present, they get completely preoccupied with the future as if they have no control over it. It’s understandable, but it can be dangerous if they forget that the past and future are not mutually exclusive. The valuable information execs have about their industry, business, and, most importantly, customers from the past could help them better understand their situation, what they need to do, what products and services they need to offer, and what messages they need to communicate in order to navigate to the profitable future they have in mind.

Intuition is OK. We’re not rejecting is wholesale. But it needs to be balanced with experienced judgment and hard facts grounded in unimpeachable data.