Business fortune tellers have excellent production values now. They used to need a stage, a conference badge and a room full of people hoping somebody else had the answer. Now they need a microphone, a fashionable keyword and a link to the thing they are actually selling.
The format changed. The temptation to rent somebody else’s confidence did not.
My frustration with this starts in automotive, long before the latest wave of LinkedIn personas and short-form business gurus. I have watched authority become a product in its own right. What irritates me is how often the performance can outrun the useful work.
The prediction survives every possible future
“The companies that win will be the ones that adapt.” Magnificent. A weather report announcing that weather will occur. No specific claim to defend, no decision to own, no possibility of being wrong. Just enough gravity in the delivery to make toddler talk sound like a diagnosis.
LinkedIn is full of this performance. A keyword gains traction and suddenly half the feed has built a professional identity around it. The same borrowed certainty migrates into a podcast, a TikTok, a YouTube channel. Everyone is explaining the future with the confidence of someone who will never have to account for the prediction.
It is exhausting because the subject is often work we already do. Real constraints get reduced to slogans by people whose visible achievement is describing the constraints to an audience. The ambiguity makes room for an authority costume.
Validation has a subscription model
There is a market for being told a basic decision is brave. A framework can provide that feeling. So can a two-hour conversation that circles an obvious point until the listener mistakes time spent for ground covered.
The affiliate link and the ebook are where the fog conveniently clears. At last, a concrete next step: pay the person who just spent ninety minutes telling you to take action.
I have no patience left for the implication that every working professional needs a guru to bless their judgment. People need access to other people doing difficult work. They need conversations specific enough to disagree with. They do not need a business fortune teller translating ordinary competence into a monthly membership.
The practitioners I want to hear from have failures, constraints and unfinished questions. Reality leaves marks on their account. The persona has a polished answer for everything because none of it has to survive contact with a job.
We are not failing to appreciate the wisdom. We have heard the fucking sentence before. A better microphone has not improved it.
Twenty years in marketing and design, across industries. Still paying attention. Considerably less patient.
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