Businesses’ Dirty Secret: Psychic Consultants

Trusting your “gut instinct” when making decisions is a time tested method of creative types and business people alike. Sometimes logic has to be thrown to the wind and you need to go with the option that just feels right. This  tactic is being expanded upon, as major companies are now turning to the services of professional “intuitors”, commonly known as psychics.

Newsweek points us to the story of Laura Day, who’s paid $10k a month as a psychic consultant:

When Seagate Technology, the $11 billion-a-year maker of hard drives for the Playstation 3 and Microsoft Xbox, went searching for a consultant to run one of its management workshops in the fall of 2006, it bypassed the usual list of Silicon Valley gurus. Instead, 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. “Anybody who can afford her will get 100 times their money’s worth.” What exactly is Day’s expertise? While she likes to downplay it as mere “intuition,” her clients prefer another explanation: she’s a psychic.

[via The Huffington Post]