Guru Greatness Gone

(Image from clipartpanda.com)

Economist writer Schumpeter laments the lack of excitement in the business thought-leadership industry:

The main problem is that the guru business is reaching the end of a long cycle of creativity. For the past two decades or so it has been driven by two seismic economic changes—the rise of the emerging world and the digital revolution....

Ironically, the digital revolution is making it harder for new gurus to emerge. Many of today’s biggest business changes are being driven by “quants”, who excel at finding meaning in big data or at producing algorithms that can automate lots of work, but who are much less good at putting numbers into words or at thinking about what big data and automation mean for industries beyond their own.

Like any guru, Schumpeter may be over-analyzing the "problem." When your humble observer attended business school in the 1970's, consulting firms like McKinsey and the Boston Consulting Group competed with investment bankers for many of the top graduates.

Not only did consultants help to fix clients' systems, e.g., accounting, sales, computer, inventory, etc., they also helped to design broad strategies and vision statements.

Now the top students start their own firms and have no need of a vision developed by outside experts who are actually more "inside the box" than they are.

Creativity may have fled the gurus, but from the vantage point of one who lives near San Francisco and Silicon Valley there's more than enough to go around.