The last six months have been an incredibly fun learning curve for me. Moving from a salaried job into consultancy has brought me into contact with some impressively dynamic business people in hitherto undiscovered parts of the economy. I’ve had to learn new ways of working, new methods to develop the business and new services to sell. And, most interestingly of all, the last few months have brought me into contact with the so-called and self-appointed “expert.” Like a big-city con-artist waiting on a street corner to fleece trusting country folk, so the expert lurks on the internet offering promises of untold wealth and success in return for some upfront cash.

As soon as you register a website, choose a twitter username and get some business cards printed, you come into contact with the expert. In fact, usually the self-appointed expert will thrust himself upon you. Without warning, you’ll be bombarded by tips to increase your twitter followership, tips to double the number of web clicks and a gallon of snake oil to grease your way to the top of the google ranking. The expert often has impressive-sounding credentials. He might point you to his self-published book (available as a PDF on his website) or a shaky video of his poorly-attended lecture during a break-out session at obscure web app summit in 2008. In some cases, his LinkedIn profile will stretch to many pages. In all cases, the expert’s promises will be vague, his credentials unsure, and above all, he should be viewed with suspicion.

The internet did not create the self-appointed expert, but it has given him a lair in which to work.

In their book “The Puritan Gift: Triumph, Collapse and Revival of an American Dream” (London: Taurus, 2007) the authors, Kenneth and William Hopper believe that the rise of “the cult of the (so-called) expert” was one of the reasons the USA lost its economic dominance in the post-war period. They chart the rise and fall of the United States boardroom as business lessons learned from the first generation of American economic titans such as Andrew Carnegie and Du Pont during the great 19th century expansion of the US economy were exported to Japan during the US Occupation in the 1940s and 1950s. Exporting these skills transformed Japan from a backward country to a modern industrial machine. Since then, and following the Japanese economic miracle, the US model of professional business management has spread around the globe, modernising the economies of many other countries, including, of course, Ireland whose economic miracle is now the subject of many history books.

Andrew Carnegie, John D Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt’s first-hand business techniques were replaced in US boardrooms with new mantras from a cult of self-appointed business experts, schooled in expensive business schools rather than in their own companies. Appearances of mega profit and rapid expansion were pursued by the so called experts as the ultimate goal of business, rather than making money through developing and selling good products. According to this school of thought, between the 1970s and the collapse of the financial system in 2008, the domestic US economy focused on financial services and moving pieces of paper about while the real economic activity took place overseas.

Governments and business owners were enthralled by the enormous profits promised by the cult of the so-called expert. The authors argued – correctly in retrospect – that businesses and economies built on real activity rather than the promises of experts would fare most strongly. The recession, ironically, has shown those areas of the economy where there were genuine experts at work, and those areas (such as the Irish banking system) where so-called self-appointed experts formed a cult which was admired but not fully understood by outsiders.

The Puritan Gift is an excellent book, written well before the recession but its lessons are very timely – the spoofer, the self-appointed expert, the spinner all fare better during periods of growth than periods of recession. If you’re good at what you do – like Carnegie or Vanderbilt – your company will be more likely to survive, but if you’ve replaced hard work with a cultish devotion to the so-called expert, you’re in trouble.