Your CEO Needs A Psychic Friend

[Brad Kenney]

Just read an interesting story about how a high-tech manufacturer uses a psychic to facilitate interdepartmental communication:

Seagate's executive director of software engineering, Gabriel Lawson, invited Laura Day—a stylish New Yorker with no tech experience—to train his Colorado-based team. "She was amazing," Lawson tells NEWSWEEK, recalling Day's quick insights into the poor coordination between the company's research and marketing teams.

I'm no psychic myself, but I can just imagine the marketing guy turning to the R&D guy, and asking him, "What am I, a mind reader?" (And then the divisional VP gets his "lightbulb moment," and even if you're no pyschic either you can easily see how this one ends.)

The story mentions a number of mentalists with CEO-stocked rolodexes, and makes the observation that "...just as there are no atheists in foxholes, a bleak business climate can make believers out of anyone."

If there's a sucker born every minute, I wonder what the rate is for conversion? And is it going up?