The End Of Management?

ILLUSTRATION FOR TIME BY PETER AND MARIA HOEY

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Success like that has made true believers out of many. But no one contests that there are risks, and markets are hardly infallible. In the stock market, frenzied buying can lead to bubbles, and day traders make money with no concern for companies' fundamentals. But if the forward march of information technology is any indication, markets will come to play an increasingly important role. No matter the industry, companies are ultimately in the business of predicting the future: what a consumer will buy, where a product can be made most cheaply, how new laws might affect profit margins. There is such an undisputed advantage to knowing the future that corporations employ analysts and strategists, create committees and reports, conduct polls and pilots all to figure out what will, and should, happen next. As HP's Huberman puts it, "A company that can predict the future is a company that is going to win." And if internal markets can refine those predictions, even incrementally? Well, then, the market signals a strong buy.