A guide to forecasting
I'm just listening live to a Financial Director web seminar entitled Future Shock: Creating the No Surprises Enterprise. Up now is the ever-excellent HSBC economist Mark Berrisford Smith.
He has been warning of the difficulties in creating accurate forecasting. Everyone in business will agree with that. Nowhere is it harder than forecasting exchange rates, he says.
And Berrisford Smith's advice? 'Give a rate, give a date, never both.' That's an adage that has a wider application than just exchange rates, though it's an approach that used too often round the boardroom table will lose you friends and influence.
(The live broadcast finishes at 11am on 3 December, by the way, but will be archived and available again at the same address this afternoon).
"Give a rate, give a date, never both" ... cute! I like, "it's better to be vaguely right than exactly wrong," which is what scenarios planners say in response to the folly of quant predictions of highly uncertain situations. The whole area of what is and what isn't quality in future thinking is the focus of my book, "Future Savvy," Amacom Press, 2008 http://tinyurl.com/5mdu2c
- Adam
Posted by Adam Gordon | December 4, 2008 3:21 PM