Rory Sutherland

We have a whole variety of different mental mechanisms at our disposal gifted to us by, you know, a few million years of evolution as a social species. And yet we've made rationality the gold standard.

economists have this fantasy of the world of companies in direct competition driving down price and increasing efficiency while supplying the same thing which is based on a false premise that people know what they want to begin with. Now I would argue when you don't create differentiation, everybody suffers.

you don't find entrepreneurs in chess clubs. You find entrepreneurs in casinos. They're playing poker. They're playing bat gam. You know, they're playing games of chance with an occasional very high payoff. And a lot of life is exactly like that, but you don't know where the huge payoff's going to come in advance.

the reason it's a catastrophic way to be paid my argument is that marketing is actually fat tailed so is innovation R&D pharmaceutical research science okay in other words 5 to 10% of what you do delivers perhaps 110% of the value

the marketing metrics the finance department has faith in and demands from marketing are not those metrics which are most conducive to building brand and customer value over time. They're the metrics which are most conducive to selling tech solutions to the companies.

the shareholder value movement is totally incoherent because over what time frame which shareholder is what are you optimizing for? It's a completely incoherent nonsense which is very very friendly to stock market analysts who want a ready supply of quarterly data

PLC's or um uh or or companies on the NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange are incentivized to behave like psychopaths because they're optimized around short-term transactional value, not long-term relationship building.

We don't really have much evolved experience in evaluating postal efficiency, do we? Okay, we have quart of a million half a million years of evolved experience in deciding who to like and trust because for most of our evolutionary, you know, existence, that was one of the most fi five most important questions to get right.

probably 50% of the time, I would advise to a client, take 10 to 20% of your marketing budget and spend it on upgrading the call center. Pay the people too much. Get the best practitioners.

the dorman was doing multiple things, many of which were human and kind of tacit. Security would be one. You know, there are no vagrants to sleep in the doorway, hailing taxis, dealing with luggage, recognizing regular guests, providing status to the hotel. There are loads and loads of value creation components to that dorman which aren't captured in the open the door definition.

But when you pursue efficiency generally you start looking at numerical or mechanical factors and of course in the process you disregard psychological factors where the greater gains may be found and so you focus too heavily on cost reduction and too little on value creation.

When you allow tech bros too much power over decision-making along with their running dog lackey in kind of management consultancy, you're optimizing for something which may be very very distant from what your real world customers really care about.

people don't decide like that at the very least you'll have to show them three or four or five skiing holidays from which they choose because we can't really choose in the absence of comparison.