Napoleon once said that all generals fight the last war.
I don’t actually know if Napoleon said that, but he’s the general you use when you want a general to have said something, so he’s whom I’m going to use. I have a point to make about the overuse of pseudo-experts when making an argument or a prediction, and I need an authority figure to cite. And when it comes to authority figures, as Dwight Eisenhower said, nobody beats Napoleon.
When you’re trying to make a point (or, more accurately, trying to sell something), it’s much easier to succeed when you can enlist someone else’s help.
I remember when I was helping a friend edit his first feature film. It was a suspense movie, with a lot of action and some terrific scenes with slowly building tension. In one sequence, the hero was caught by two bad guys, each with a gun pointed in his direction. It was a good moment, but I suggested that, maybe, it was worth re-cutting the sequence so that we could see the hero’s face a bit closer.
The editor leaned back in his chair. “Alfred Hitchcock said,” he announced, “that you should never cut away from the gun.’”
There is no record of the great director of suspense movies ever saying that. And to be honest, I don’t think it’s even correct: There are plenty of reasons to cut away from the gun during a scene. In James Bond movies, for instance, they will often cut away from the gun for a close shot of Bond’s perfectly arched eyebrow. That’s sort of what I was going for.
But the editor was done for the day. He was tired and had been at it since early morning, and he didn’t really want to re-cut a sequence just to show something to the director’s friend. So he and Alfred Hitchcock convinced us it would never work and that it was a mistake to suggest, and it was getting close to dinner time. That was that.
While it may not have been the right way to cut the scene, it was exactly the right way to avoid a lot of tiresome work, and that’s often what underlies the appeal to an unimpeachable authority.
For instance, in the late 1980s, a huge phone company hired a top-of-the-line consultancy to make a forecast.
Cellphone usage was growing quickly, and the phone company needed to know how to plan for this new, business model-transforming technology.
So it paid the consultants a lot of money to answer this question: How many mobile phones will be in use in this country by the year 2000?
Simple, clear question, right? The consultants crunched demographic and economic and technological data and rates of build-out and carrier upgrades and a lot of other words I don’t understand, and they came up with an answer.
By 2000, they said confidently in the report they sent to the phone company with their invoice that the United States will have as many as 1 million mobile phones in use.
That was a big number, of course, but not big enough to require the telephone company to rethink everything and come up with new strategies and radically different business models. Not big enough, in other words, for a lot of tiresome work.
For the record, by 2000, there were 109 million mobile phones in use. And by 2020, that number was about 275 million. So the consultants were off by a factor of 100.
But it’s easy to blame the consultants and mock them for their error. Given what they knew in the late 1980s, their prediction made sense. It seemed reasonable. The only real mistake they made was to make a prediction in the first place about an industry that was innovating at an unpredictably rapid pace. On the other hand, they delivered the answer that their paymasters wanted. Through a series of subtle and not-so-subtle messages, the consultants understood that what the phone company executives wanted to hear was, Don’t worry, you got this. It’s all going to be easy-peasy. And they were paid handsomely for the service.
It’s never a bad business move to give the customers exactly what they want, as Russian President Vladimir Putin says.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
