Ever since there have been people, there have been experts.
Their titles may have differed but throughout history leaders have always found that someone stood ready and willing to explain what they should do next.
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As businesses grew, consultants grew right along with them. The Glass-Steagall Banking Act in 1933, enacted in response to the Great Depression, provided a heavy-duty impetus to the consulting business.
The law stopped banks from getting actively involved in reorganizations and consulting activities, sparking demand for expert advice in banking, finance, management, strategy and organization.
Between the 1970s up the 1990s the global consulting market grew every single year, despite two recessions, fueled by high demand for strategic services and operational management.
Billionaire: Make the complex simple
In 2002, for the first time in decades, the sector faced a contraction, followed by an even larger downturn between 2009 and 2011 in the wake of the global financial crisis.
Today, the consulting business is a massive global market, valued at roughly $250 billion to $1 trillion.
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But who are these people we call experts?
Well, Alec Issigonis, the automotive designer who came up with the Morris Minor car, later called the Austin Mini, said “an expert is someone who tells you why you can’t do something.”
Author Laurence J. Peter, whose Peter Principle states that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to a level of respective incompetence, said “make three correct guesses consecutively and you will establish a reputation as an expert.”
And then there was the actor, writer and raconteur Peter Ustinov, who declared that “if the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can’t be done.”
Manoj Bhargava has his own take on experts and consultants and the billionaire philanthropist and corporate executive who founded 5-hour Energy shared his thoughts on his recently launched The Business of Everything podcast.
“My job is to make complex simple, whereas it seems the consultant’s job is to make simple complicated,” he said. “We use some experts and consultants sometimes, and usually when a science guy says it can’t be done, to me that’s validation that it can.”
Bhargava, majority owner of TheStreet’s parent, The Arena Group (AREN) , says an expert is “someone who knows everything that was.”Â
Entrepreneur: experts know what was
“He’s really good at what was,” he said. “And if you ask him about what will be, he’ll say ‘no, no, that can’t be done because I’m an expert on what was.’ … Why do I need you? Because if I wanted to do what was, I don’t have a business.”
Bhargava said he did indeed talk to experts “just to make sure that maybe they’ve thought of something or the history of that area is something that we haven’t thought of. But we really don’t rely on them for the future because that’s just silly.”
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This may sound counterintuitive, but Bhargava says not knowing an industry “can give you a leg up.”
“There’s so much assumption. If you go to an expert, he’ll say in order to get to Walmart (WMT) , you’ve got to do this and this and it’ll take three to five years,” he said.
“We didn’t know that, so we went to Walmart (WMT)  and said, ‘hey, we got a great product that’s selling well.’ And they go, ‘OK, we’ll put it in.'”
“People have said to me, ‘how did you get in?'” Bhargava added. “Because we didn’t take their view that we couldn’t get in now.”
Bhargava makes liberal use of air quotes when it comes to the subject of experts.
“People have these little views on why you should do something and they’re just not right,” he said. “There’s no common sense to them, but they’re … experts so you end up with stuff that experts all know. And they don’t know jack.”
The knowledge you need, Bhargava said, is to make sure that you don’t repeat mistakes that other people have made.
“I guess I’m of the belief that if an expert says this, and common sense says this, I always go with common sense,” he said.
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