When leadership advice feels like buzzwords and platitudes, it's time to get real.

HPR's podcast Coaching Real Leaders brings you behind closed doors as Muriel Wilkins coaches anonymous

leaders through raw honest career questions

that we all face.

Listen and follow coaching real leaders for free

wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HBR Idea Cast from Harvard Business Review.

I'm Justin Fox, and I'm talking today with Walter Friedman,

a lecturer and director of the Business History Initiative

at Harvard Business School,

an author of the new book, Fortune Teller's, the story of America's

first economic forecasters. Walter, welcome to Ideacast.

Thank you so much for having me on.

So your focus in this book is on the country's first economic forecasters.

When did they arrive on the scene?

They arrived on the scene around the turn of the century.

One of the things that was interesting to me about forecasting was that it was a lot like

other things that were happening at this time, which was a period from the late 19th century

to the early 20th century, when the American economy was moving from

agriculture to industry and a lot of historians had looked at things like

Taylorism which is to say production management and at personnel management and I also looked at

the history of sales management all these things develop at this time to make the

functioning of business more rational and more efficient.

...