The emergence of cargo cults on some Pacific Islands after World War
II is an amusing and oft-repeated story.

The relatively primitive lifestyles of these islanders were
interrupted by Japanese aircraft dropping large supplies of clothing,
medicine, canned food and tents to support the Japanese war effort.
Some of these supplies were shared with islanders, in exchange for
their assistance.

After the war, when planes and their valuable cargos disappeared,
some islanders took to imitating the rituals they'd observed the
Japanese performing. They carved headphones from wood and wore them
while sitting in fabricated control towers. And they waved landing
signals while standing on abandoned runways.

I've noticed the emergence of a similar cargo cult in organisations
in recent years — particularly those organisations that sell major
products and services.

Sales departments have observed a rapid evolution in the performance
of their organisations' operations departments. They've seen outputs
increase by orders of magnitude. And they've seen quality and on-
time performance improve by similar degrees.

Of course, sales departments have also observed that these
performance improvements have been accompanied by an increase in the
usage of mathematics in operations — and, particularly, an increase
in the role of statistics.

Sales departments have taken to imitating these rituals — in the hope
that they will have a similar effect on the performance of their
departments. Increasingly, we're seeing mathematical models,
sophisticated databases and business intelligence tools being applied
in the pursuit of greater (or more consistent) sales results.
What sales departments fail to recognise, however, is that operations
uses such tools to measure (and predict) the behaviour of processes
that are inherently measureable. Sales processes, for the most part,
are not.

Let's consider the practice of sales forecasting: a perfect example
of this management hocus-pocus ...

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