There is no good way to reliably predict the future in these markets anymore, except maybe by being privy to the desires of an ever-decreasing number of centrally connected power players. Companies still need guidance, but if rational analysis is nearly impossible, is it any wonder that executives are asking for less of it? What they are asking for is something, well, less productive.

The Anti-Intelligence Culture

Strategic intelligence is more and more like reading the Harvard Business Review through a fun house mirror. Sure, people use the words strategy, future, and foresight, but they mean something quite different.

In my experiences, and based on what my colleagues in the field tell me, executives today do not do well when their analysts confront them with challenging, though often relatively benign, predictions. Confusion, anger, and psychological transference are common responses to unwelcome analysis.

While executives pride themselves on being supremely rational technocrats able to calmly assess changes in the world without letting their personal emotions cloud their analysis, the reality is often quite a bit more human. One senior executive shut down a half-day event about future trends within the first ten minutes after a slide warning about "global aging populations" came up. The silver-haired alpha dog not only refused to discuss the fact that their average customer was near the age of social security and getting ready to leave active economic life, he asserted that Baby Boomers are not in fact aging, that "60 is the new 40," that all future strategic problems will be solved by "getting our numbers up," and that nobody in the company was to mention aging populations ever again.

One group of government officials, while discussing the anticipated tax base from housing and retail, became suddenly unhinged when an analyst suggested that those sectors would not immediately re-inflate back to pre-2008 levels. When shown charts illustrating that Americans have ten times as much retail square footage as Europeans, and that housing bubble was, well, a bubble, the politicians angrily retorted that America was special and its population required ten times as many options when shopping. They blustered that houses always regain value and that the multi-trillion dollar bailout was "a one-time mistake."

In early 2009, many European executives were quick to point out to me that the "financial crisis" was a "uniquely American problem" -- and that Portugal and Greece were fine, thank you very much. As European central banks privately rushed to keep the peripheral countries solvent in 2010, I was told not to publicly discuss any such possibilities while working with European groups. They didn't want to hear it.

When a colleague of mine was brought into his employer's "corporate strategy group" a couple of years ago, he saw it as a great honor to be included in the one unit dedicated solely to the company's long-term success. Once allowed in to the secretive confines of the group, he discovered that the mandate of the position had, after 2008, been radically altered. Rather than mapping out how the markets were likely to change and his company might stay ahead, he was made to flip through old spreadsheets to find which products were most profitable, then get salesmen to "sell more of them." When he asked if he should perhaps include analysis of trends in society, technology, and economics to anticipate what long-term options they should be exploring, he was informed, "You need to go back to grad school if you just want to study stuff for no reason."