Speculation

"Decision making in business is far trickier than most people suppose. There is no real way to prove cause and effect. When you make a big decision, there is no status quo against which to compare the new reality, because the status quo is no more. There are no control groups. You can only imagine counterfactuals and speculate. This is because business is not like natural science. You can’t just hold all things still and change one variable, much less repeat the experiment. The flow of commercial life is forward and an infinite number of things are constantly changing. Speculating on the future -- and even speculating on unseen scenarios on roads not taken in the past -- is an inescapable feature of commerce."

Jeffrey Tucker
1.27.13