Clairvoyance

The world over, B-schools seem to think that candidates seeking entry into their hallowed corridors would be some kind of seers, prophets or visionaries. Or that they have access to a crystal ball or a tarot-card picking talking parrot to accurately and vividly explain the future to them. So do companies that seek to hire prospective employees in interviews that look for a “fit” with the organization. I’m talking, of course, of the “Where do you see yourself five years from now?” question. The tripe that we are expected to spew forth is nothing more than a mish-mash of wishful thinking molded as per the company’s requirements. Supposedly, whatever we mumble out is a sure-shot way of identifying if the knucklehead in front of him is capable of recommending entry strategies into the entry-level four-wheeler market for Japanese two wheeler manufacturers in emerging markets. The standard reply goes so... For a consulting firm interview, five years from now, you are supposed to be "acquiring competencies and knowledge of specific functions and industries", and ten years from now, you are supposed to be "actively engaging in business development, seeking out new clients for the firm and increasing the revenue stream from existing clients". For an investment bank interview, five years from now, you are supposed to be "recognized as an industry expert in a particular field". And ten years from now, you are supposed to be "actively engaging in acquiring new clients for the firm". Similar template answers can be found for marketing profiles, finance profiles, IT consulting profiles, you name it.

A few thoughts on that… How are companies going to discern whether we are being truthful about where we see ourselves five years from now or just pulling random words out of our behinds and stringing them to form barely coherent sentences? By peering into the future, five years from now, in a bleak post-apocalyptic wasteland, where we will be digging up roots in the search for water to quench our thirst, keeping an eye out for mutants, aliens and cannibals? Or by looking into our eyes, and reading our minds? If interviewers could actually look into the future, wouldn’t they have been making billions off the stock market all on their own (or making the right bets in various games of chance – Horse racing, poker, Greyhound racing), instead of wasting time interviewing all sorts of riff-raff that claims to have seen the future?

Conversely, if we knew where we would be five years from now, why would anybody with functional brain cells even bother applying to a million companies in the quest for a job? Would it not make much more sense to apply to just the company we see ourselves five years from now? If we actually knew where we would be five years from now, and told the interviewer exactly where we will be five years from now, how would the company believe it? Five years ago, in my second year of engineering, if I could state an exact description of my roles and responsibilities of the job I am about to join, would anybody have believed me?

I don’t know what I’ll be having for breakfast tomorrow. I don't know whether I'll be having breakfast tomorrow. When I get into a flight from Chennai to Bengaluru, I don’t know what would happen 45 minutes from now. How the heck would I know what I would be doing five full years ahead of today? The maximum somebody can say is that five years from now, he would be in some particular location, or some particular industry, or some particular hazy nebulous description of what you would like to be doing at some distant point in the future, and nothing beyond that. But then again, that would be mere wishful thinking. All you could say is that five years from now, you would be wearing sunscreen.