Developments In Demand Forecasting From Ancients Greeks To Present

NEW DEVELOPMENTS IN BUSINESS FORECASTING Larry Lapide Director of Value Chain Strategy, Benchmarking Partners, Inc. DEVELOPMENTS IN DEMAND FORECASTING FROM ANCIENTS GREEKS TO PRESENT (This is the first article in an ongoing column in The Journal of Business Forecasting. The column will appear in each issue and is intended to give a brief view on a potential topic of interest to practitioners of business forecasting. Since this is the first in a series, this article is a brief overview of the history of the progress in demand forecasting methods. Ed) Peter L. Bernstein, in his book entitled Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk, chronicles the advances in the understanding and modeling of uncertainty. His thesis is that man’s view on uncertainty (and hence forecasting the future) followed an evolutionary path that started from the Ancient Greeks’ beliefs that one did not have to forecast because the gods, at times whimsically, controlled the future. During the Renaissance, the philosophy changed. People started to understand uncertainty and probabilistic events, driven by a precise structure put in place by Nature. In the latter part of the 1900s, with the advent ...