Transcription
[Music] What Got You There with Sean Delaney? What Got You There?
There's a great phrase from the advertising guy, Howard Luck Gossage, when he said, "Whoever it was discovered water, it sure as hell wasn't a fish." Okay? And the point is, we don't notice the things in which we're immersed. We just think they're the way the world works, and we don't notice them. And having that ability to first of all zoom out and go, "Don't let you think of it, this is really weird."
Rory Sutherland is Vice Chairman of one of the world's most respected advertising agencies, Ogilvy and Mather. He is the author of *Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life*, which is one of Sean's highly recommended books. On this episode, Rory will shake your way of thinking by peeling back the curtain to what it's like inside one of the greatest minds in advertising, consumer psychology, and behavioral economics. Rory, welcome to What Got You There. How are you doing today?
Very well. It's great to be on, too. Thank you very much for inviting me.
Yeah, you're you're one of those people who just open up my mind every single time I listen to you, read something, or have a conversation. So I'm really excited to dive deep with you today. But I thought we could start, uh, somewhere a little bit different with some quick-hit questions. And I would love to know, favorite place you've ever traveled?
Crikey. Okay. Santa Fe, New Mexico.
What about, who's the person you've looked up to the most throughout your career?
Probably, um, complicated because you can include personal figures and professional figures. Um, David Ogilvy is a kind of necessary, uh, answer, even though I only met him once. Uh, and Drayton Bird, who was the creative director and chairman of the agency when I first joined, and the kind of guru of direct response advertising in Britain, really. Two huge influences. But there, ultimately, there usually is never just one. They're about, you know, I would say they're about 15 or 20 people who've been decisive.
Absolutely. Yeah. Hopefully, we can explore that a little bit further. I'm wondering if you were a superhero, what would you want your superpower to be?
Um, I'd love to joke about this. Have you ever heard this, which is a guy who said, "I was asked to choose a superpower, and I chose the power of hindsight." Now that I come to think of it, anyway. Um, the superpower, I love this idea of the power of hindsight, knowing what we should have done. If only, you know. Um, okay, a superpower would be, actually, I find, um, uh, video calling a borderline superpower, and nobody's noticed. So I'm going to name that.
I think that Zoom is actually fairly much akin to a form of magic, and the thing that has completely baffled me is the fact that nobody got excited about its possibilities until they were forced to.
Can you expand on that?
Screw the quick-hit questions. No, no. I mean, I, I, I don't think that business travel and business behavior will revert to the status quo. I think they'll be more flexible working. I think more people will work remotely or from home. Um, I think, I think, and I think the implications are actually enormous. Let me explain. I'll put it in a very interesting way.
When you think about it, once you decide to take on what you might call white-collar employment, there are huge advantages. Now, what this is not is a load of, basically, privilege. I don't want this to be a load of privileged people whinging, okay? And going, "Oh, poor us," you know, sort of, you know, those kind of middle-class whinges or, you know, kind of first-world problems, okay? But nonetheless, it's fair to say that white-collar employment, however talented you may be, doesn't offer you anything like the freedom of blue-collar employment.
Now, depending on your temperament, your degree of extroversion, your commitments to, let's say, family or children or anything else, it is possible. I'm not saying it's easy, but it's possible to find blue-collar employment that just suits you. So, you know, if you're a bit of a, you know, an introvert, you know, a bit of a loner, you might want to become a long-distance lorry driver, right? Or if you'd like a lot of camaraderie, you can, you know, and you could get into scaffolding, or you could do shift work, or become a taxi driver, or run, if you really hated commuting, you could run a shop, right, and live above it.
White-collar employment, basically, once you sign up to the whole white-collar world, it is something like, you know, what is it? Five days a week, nine hours a day, generally a fairly comp, you know, painful commute. Um, and you have no freedom to work your life around, say, childcare commitments or, um, the fact that you're just sick of commuting. So I always think of white-collar employees, most people retire because they're sick of commuting, not because they're sick at work.
And so I was talking to Brian Featherstonehall, who was the, um, uh, sort of HR and talent guru within Ogilvy, who founded himself as just sort of semi-retired. And I, I advanced my theory that actually the whole of labor economics totally misunderstood what you're paying people for, okay? And so the assumption in labor economics, the reason why pay is called compensation, is that you sacrifice leisure for work, okay? And you have desirable hours of leisure, and then you have hours of work, and you sell your hours of leisure to your employer in whatever amount you choose. Good luck with that, okay? In exchange for money, okay? And that's how labor economics is basically based.
And I said, my theory to start with, which I thought was pretty good, which is actually what this reveals is people don't really want that much free time. What they want is free *when* and free *where*. So that autonomy over where you work and when you work, and the order in which you perform jobs, and the time of day in which you perform them, is arguably more valuable to many people than actually time off work, okay? Um, that's. And I said this to Brian, and he added the perfect thing. He said, "The, what is money? What you've added is two, uh, variables, which is, uh, the where and the when." He said, "There's an even more important variable you've missed: free *who*." Who you work with, okay?
And one of the magical things, I think, about, uh, the video conferencing world is that previously, we were kind of confined to working exclusively with people who happen to share a space with us, okay? Right. And now, quite a lot of my work is actually barter. So I will agree to give a talk to a guy at London School of Economics, and in turn, I'll engage with a Zoom call with him, saying, "We've got this interesting project. Do you have any instincts?" And he says, "Have you had a look at construal level theory? That might be quite helpful." And so the free *who* is equally important. So the ability to actually collaborate at a time that suits you, at a place that suits you, with the people that suit you, okay? It's from.
And I always wondered why is it that nobody does a four-day week? Because quite a lot of people are rich enough, right? It makes a big difference. Now, I realize actually, a lot of people work for a lot of people work from home on Friday. It was never official, it was always done under cover. But if you look at Sevenoaks station car park near me, that car park is bloody half empty on a Friday, pre-COVID. I mean, it's totally empty now. Um, and the thing that interests me there is that, um, I could never quite understand why nobody ever took the deal. And they read, there were two, there are several reasons for this. One of which is, you're less likely to get promoted because people see you as less committed, which is one problem. I think that happened with flexible working for people like mums and carers and other people with other commitments, and dads, by the way, stereotype. Um, uh, and that was one part of it, okay?
But the other part of it was, people realized, "Look, I'll get paid 80% of the wage, and I'll end up working 90% as hard because I'll end up working till midnight on Thursday evening, and I'll end up working on Sunday to catch up for the last Friday." So I won't, it won't be a very equitable exchange. But then I suddenly realized that actually, it isn't really, it isn't really the free time that people entirely crave. It's first of all, if you actually don't have to commute, you pretty much gain 10 hours a week, okay? In any major city like London, New York, San Francisco, okay? You're gaining a significant chunk of time to not having to travel. The world, London's arguably worse than many other places.
And what people really want is autonomy. It's not actually leisure. And I, I thought I just found the whole thing absolutely fascinating because I think everybody, pre-COVID, everybody believed they themselves could safely work remotely, but they didn't believe everybody else could be trusted to do it. What's bizarre? I mean, even total evangelists like me would never have proposed five days a week for seven months in a row. But even that, which is really testing an idea to destruction, yeah, that's insanity, okay? I mean, I'd always propose something like a two-day week in the office and a three-day week, which is, you know, flexible. Um, but, but even when we've tested it to destruction, as Londoners have undoubtedly under these conditions, it's uneven. And some people have suffered, and some people find it very difficult. But mostly, it's actually worked an order of magnitude better than anybody would have predicted.
I think, I think it's fair to say that, of course, it's an interesting technology because it's a technology that has network effects. It's like the fax machine. It only works if a significant number of people adopt it. Because if you have three people working remotely and seven people who insist on going into the office every day, it's gonna be a kind of, you know, it's going to be all right. What we really need to do is solve the coordination problem. So you have office days and remote days.
And by the way, I had this amusing situation which I didn't really know what to do about, which is we did go back into the office for two days a week in between the two UK lockdowns. And I thought, well, I'm the Vice Chairman, it does set a bit of a signal if I go in. And so I, I got onto my piano, so I really ought to go into the office just a few times, you know, just to show my face. And we couldn't make it work because I had so many Zoom calls that there wasn't time to get into the office. And I said, "No, I could go into the office and spend the whole day doing video conferencing, but that's totally idiotic." I don't think that's stupid, right? I'm not going into an office to video conference. You know, that's like going into an office to send an email. That's like 1987, right?
And, um, so in the end, I mean, effectively, I never, I never got to go in because I couldn't find the time. And of course, we're now working in many cases with groups of people where you can't, you know, I'm involved in projects where one guy's in Australia, another guy's in France, and there's somebody in the U.S. We can't replicate that in the physical space anyway. You know, it takes six months to get the people in the same place.
Yeah, I'm wondering then, how would you attack that coordination problem? And I'm even wondering about bringing on new employees into an organization.
Yeah, that's that's the big issue that WPP worries about, which is onboarding. But equally, first of all, the nature of the office itself needs to change. And it needs to be part kind of library, because some people need an office for solitude and seclusion, part pub for serendipitous encounters, you know, just maximizing, uh, you know, random social encounters. And then part of it needs to be a kind of ideation and creation area. But I think what we made the mistake of was we designed the open-plan office to be an average, and it's neither solitude nor is it sociability. And actually, it has the virtues of neither.
David Ogilvy never wrote anything in the office. If he had to write body copy, if he hadn't write his books, he went home. He said, "I can't write in the office, too many distractions." Now, when you've created an office where you can't write, okay, you've got a problem, haven't you? But we have done that. We've literally created a space where a large range of personality types find it incredibly difficult to work. I can't write in the office either. The book, I did a mixture of writing it at the weekend. When I wrote a book, I went, I took a month's unpaid leave or something and disappeared down to the Kent coast and just wrote it there. But I could, I don't think a single word of that was written, uh, I might have written a few words on a train or something, but I don't think a single word of that, that book was written in the, in the office.
Do you see anyone executing this, this creative idea generation space along with the pub, along with the library, is anyone executing that well right now?
Well, that was Brian Featherstonehall's point, actually, that you need this. I mean, there are attempts to do it online, and we're obviously experimenting with things like Miro and various online technologies which help you co-create, to use the jargon, you know, and to ideate. I think, by the way, I think Zoom has some very interesting implications as to how we do create creativity or or co-co-creation, um, which is, um, uh, things like brainstorming. We always cram them into a whole day or a whole morning because the cost of getting everybody in the same place at the same time and booking the room, the coordination costs, and the travel costs were so high. When you finally got everybody together, you tried to do everything.
And I've argued quite, quite for quite a long time that Zoom brainstorms should work differently. You should have a two-hour meeting, and then you should have a five-day break. Two hours of immersion where everybody understands the problem, five-day break, fermentation time, okay? And then get together for maybe three hours, five days later, maybe a week later, and then do the ideation there. Because the reason we tried to do everything in one block of time was simply a product of the difficulty of getting everybody co-located. When that's not really a problem anymore, and when there's no, you know, there's no travel cost involved, I think we should stop that and we should experiment with the, the double brainstorm, as it were.
And so I think, you know, I, I'm weirded out by the fact that I think Ogilvy and a bunch of other businesses should be sitting down now and going, "Okay, what's our Zoom strategy?" In other words, you know, um, if you're particularly if you're a global business, okay, you can suddenly form on the fly a kind of a team of nine people, more, you know, okay? It's difficult if they're in Hawaii or in Australia, but it's not impossible, okay? I mean, I've got a colleague in Australia who just works very strange hours. He has kind of, he gets up very early in the morning and sometimes stays up really late at night, but, you know, and sometimes sleeps during the day. But equally, he's got quite a lot of daylight to himself, so it's not a totally unsatisfactory solution.
But we fundamentally, the way companies are structured, was around this assumption of physical collocation. And we've got to rethink real estate strategy. We've got to rethink where our offices are for purposes of resilience as well, because this could happen again. But we've also got to rethink real, real patterns of work because, particularly an entity like Ogilvy, which can now create. Because I'll tell you, I've seen what was extraordinary. I find this utterly fascinating because business communication was actually quite old-fashioned when you think about it. Because kids have adopted all these things like Snapchat and Zoom and TikTok and God knows what, yeah? Okay? And they're using social media, and they're using a bit of email, and they're using text, and they're using, uh, you know, WhatsApp, okay? You have this whole panoply of consumer communication forms.
And, um, the strange thing was about the business world is it was totally bipolar. In that you either had literally something incredibly cold, textual, reductionist, and time-consuming and asynchronous, by the way, like spreadsheets, email, okay? You know, a memo at best, or an email. And then you had this yawning gulf, and then you had a physical meeting, or flying to Frankfurt for a two-hour meeting, okay? There's nothing in between.
Now, the interesting thing about about video calling is not really that it's video. The video is almost there for psychological value, it's to give you something to look at. Um, the problem with telephone conference calls is we all got distracted. Let's be honest, because we're not designed to listen to a very boring conversation for three hours with nothing to look at, you know, we simply haven't evolved that way. But the fascinating thing with video is that it's synchronous. And if you think about it, the asynchronous nature of email unbelievably slows down decision-making. And actually, email is essentially bureaucracy on steroids. Because one of the fact, one of the facets of a bureaucracy is a synchronicity of decision-making. "I'd like to release you from jail, but I can't release you from jail until this person's approved the so-and-so form, and this person needs to get you fingerprinted, and the fingerprint man's on holiday." Right, okay? That's when you get really awful bureaucracy.
And we all play the game, by the way. I, I bet every single person listening to this has done this. Right? Friday evening, it's about three o'clock, and you're looking forward to bunking off and watching a bit of telly or having a drink. And an email comes in. It goes, "I really need you to write 400 words for our pitch to so-and-so, so-and-so." "It'd be really handy if you could do this." Oh, [expletive], I can do this now too. Now, really, I really should do this now. Oh, [expletive], I can't face it. I'm just knackered. And then you have this little thing, "Bing! Where's the loophole?" They haven't said when they need it by. So I hit reply and type, "Yeah, really great. I'd love to write that 400 words on so-and-so. When do you need it by?" I then hit send, turn off my computer, and go, "Okay, I've cleared that one." Because I've shunted responsibility back to someone else because I found this missing little link in their little thing of what they specified, okay? Right.
And as a result, the asynchronicity of email is a brilliant way you can duck responsibility, postpone, delay, or just fail to reach a decision because one missing, there's one person missing who needs to be there in order to ratify something. And so the, the interesting thing is, my email volume is still quite high, but 80% of my emails are now arranging Zoom calls. And so the number of actually really difficult emails I have to respond to is 10% of what it was. And now I do, obviously, I do literally five times more Zoom calls. But one thing we often forget is talking is a hell of a lot faster and easier than writing is. Yeah.
And when you have a bunch of people in a room, it's also much more creative because conversations, synchronous conversations go places you weren't planning on, you weren't, you didn't expect, okay? Whereas fundamentally, correspondence, or for that matter, a physical meeting with an agenda. And there's a very, very eminent kind of, um, uh, entrepreneur and multi-millionaire in Britain who says a board meeting should be a conversation. It shouldn't be a series of PowerPoint slides. And what we've done with physical meetings is, because of the cost involved in the scarcity of time, we've actually agenda-ized them to within an inch of their life. I always think that about a third of a meeting should have no agenda attached because you don't know what other people don't know. You, you know, and so the value of some degree of randomness to conversation is really, really high because every time you have a random conversation, you learn five things about the problem that you didn't know, but nor would you have known to ask, either.
Yeah, and it's sort of unknown unknowns, I guess. And they, they only come out in, um, in random conversation. So I'm a massive enthusiast for this. I think it will improve, um, business productivity and competitiveness. And I think it will also, I think, I think it's positive for the environment. I think it's extremely positive. How many people retire? When people retire from blue-collar jobs, they're not retiring because they don't like accountancy. Yeah, bizarre as it may seem, accountants quite enjoy doing a bit of accountancy. All those people are retiring because they want free win, free wear, and free who, okay? So it has huge implications for things like maternity, paternity, people who have other commitments. It also has, um, implications for retirement as well.
Yeah, I mean, you bring up the synchronicity, and even this conversation, right? We had no idea this was going to be the direction it was taken. Yeah. I, I am wondering though, when we talk about the coordination of that, you can find me, you can hit me with some more fast questions, by the way.
No, no, no. This is, this is going to be more entertaining. Um, so you talk about having to coordinate everyone in the physical space. Why doesn't Zoom have a feature, say, you can have a 10-person meeting? We know half those people, a lot of times, might not be needed. Why isn't there a feature where it shows the cost per attendee of a meeting?
I think that would ruin it. And the other thing is, I'm always very wary about doing that because you would be showing the cost, but not the value.
I take your point in that. I wonder how you, how you think through the value there that is unforeseen on a spreadsheet.
Well, first of all, it's worth remembering, of course, in a physical meeting, you have to pretend to pay attention. Now, I would regard it as perfectly acceptable, okay, in a meeting, in a Zoom meeting, for somebody who was who realized that actually the next 30 minutes, 40 minutes, I've got to sit there as a copywriter. In physical meetings, if you went to the client's offices to present, I'd have to sit there and pretend to be engaged in the discussion of timings and costs and budgets, okay? Because the obligation and the physical, I can't just sit there in a physical meeting and go, "Okay," because that's considered highly rude, okay?
Now, on Zoom, I can do the equipment. I could turn off video, leave on my headphones, get on with something else. I did that, actually. There was a meeting that happened exactly yesterday where I was there all day, or not all day, but it was a three-hour meeting. And when they got into, when they were showing creative work, I didn't need to be there, but they were showing creative work, so I wanted to look at creative work to see what was going on because that's within my, you know. And when they were showing creative work, I didn't pay absolutely rapt attention. Okay? I did go off and do a few emails and, you know, and, uh, and also I think I, um, uh, I also wrote something. I had something to write at the time, and I did a little bit of writing as well, okay? Um, so I did get it, I did, you know, I did get involved in something else.
And then when they started talking about timings and budgets and procurement issues, I basically turned off my video, left it on in the background, on the speaker, not on headphones, as if it was a really tedious version of Radio 4. For example, if you take NudgeStock, which is our behavioral science festival, which went online, we had an audience of 120,000, okay? And it went on for 14 hours. Now, I don't think, I don't think many people were rapt to the screen for all 14 hours. I was very insistent that as well as streaming it on LinkedIn, we had to stream it on YouTube. And my argument was, most people have YouTube on their TV now. If you have a smart TV, I said, "Look, we can't expect someone to give up the use of their laptop for 14 hours for a conference." But if we stream it through YouTube, anybody with a smart TV or something, you know, you know, I think the Amazon Fire Stick has YouTube on it, does it? Or do they not? As a, I'm not sure. But I mean, certainly, you know, you could Chromecast it, you know, very easily as well, okay? YouTube. So anybody with a telly can basically get on with a day's work for a few hours and leave this on, as, you know, it's talk radio with pictures, you know, effectively. Because a lot of people work with music on, there's no reason you can't work with with conversation on. And, you know, they'll pay more attention for some talks, they'll pay less attention for others.
I'm not sure this is, I'm not sure this is all upside, to be absolutely honest. I mean, people, the vital thing that people are missing is that people go, "Ah, but it's not the same as being physically co-located." And I go, "Hold on a second, babe. Okay? What you're not looking at here is that 95% of your Zoom meetings would never have happened in the physics." We'll take this one, okay? Right. If we didn't have the technology, you're in, I don't know where you are, New York? Is it?
Oh, I know. I'm in South Florida.
In South Florida, right? Okay. Well, you know, I mean, we probably could meet physically once a year if we were, you know, I'd probably go to Miami once a year on average, okay? But what I mean is that would involve, you know, several thousand pounds worth of air travel, hotel stays. It would also take up, not two hours of a day or one hour of the day, it would take up three days just for the travel. Okay? So it's completely nonsensical to say it's not as good as a physical meeting because it never would have been a physical meeting anyway.
And I'm wondering how you've approached talent acquisition, right? Like Ogilvy is always trying to bring on more and talented people. You're an original thinker. I'm wondering what it looks like through your eyes when you spot talent.
One other thing is whether talent becomes a bit uberized. And so one of the opportunities I'm looking at is actually recruiting retired people purely on an on-call basis. So there are a lot of very brilliant people who've retired, okay? And as I said, they're enjoying their free who, their free time, but they're also really enjoying their free who, their free wear, and their free when, which is, you know, if they want to go to France for six weeks, you know, they can do that, okay? Now, with Zoom, there's no reason why when they're in France for six weeks, uh, they can't just, you know, if I'm willing to pay a few hundred pounds for an hour of their time, why wouldn't you? Okay? I've paid for, you know, I've paid for a nice meal out for the family or whatever it is, you know, and you've spent an hour on Zoom, well, you know, from your garden in, you know, France, right? Who wouldn't do that?
And I've got a theory, okay? That everybody in the world, apart from like Tony Blair or Barack Obama, everybody in the world would give you an hour of their time on Zoom. And the, on Zoom is an important component of it. On Zoom for a thousand dollars or less, okay? So if you take out mega-stars, if you take out Madonna, if you take out multi-billionaires, okay? You know, Warren Buffett would probably go, "Nah, bother." Okay? You never know, he's probably quite stingy, Warren. Um, but, but what I'm saying is that's really important. Now, why won't they? Why won't they give an hour of their time to give a talk for a thousand dollars? A lot of people are charging five, ten, fifteen, twenty thousand pounds to give a talk. Why is that? Because you've got to travel.
Now, the opportunity cost of being in a specific location at a specific time, where, where you have, by the way, almost zero freedom to cancel. So I've done a bit of a stint on the speaker circuit. And what you've got to remember is the second I say, "Yes, I'll give you a talk at four o'clock in the afternoon in Amsterdam, uh, for an hour," okay? What I'm charging for isn't the talk, okay? It's the day out of my life. It's the fact that I'm knackered the following day because I've just flown to Amsterdam and back in a day. It's the fact that I've had to walk two miles through sodding Schiphol Airport, take my laptop out of my bag, go through all that [expletive]. It's the fact that I now can't work on a pitch because I'm going to be out for two days that week. So my time is therefore more or less useless, okay? And it's also the fact that actually I can't go on holiday that week because once I've committed to be in Amsterdam to, to an audience of 200 people, that's basically it. There's no point in going on holiday, right? Because I'm in Amsterdam on Wednesday.
Now, if I commit to an hour on Zoom, not only is it only an hour and not a day, but the opportunity cost is more or less nil. In fact, if it can be agreed that the hour is a bit flexible, so if you say, "Look, I'll try and, I'll try to make it 2 p.m. on Wednesday, but if my last thing overruns, it's okay if we do it at four instead. Can you block out both hours and I'll do one of the two?" If you can make it a bit flexible like that, which you can't do in a physical meeting because I'd have to be sitting around clicking my heels, you know, like a dick for two hours in the two hours where I wasn't needed, say, okay? That kind of thing, okay? It's totally different. And I don't think people are spotting that. The math is all, it's all what Google calls moonshot. It's not, you know, it's not like 10% cheaper, 5% cheaper, 7% more efficient, 4% less time-consuming. It's like orders of magnitude different.
So one thing I think is going to die, and I hate to say this because, you know, we've got airline clients, but the one-day business trip, whether it's by train or by plane or even by car, that traveling to a meeting that lasts an hour and then traveling back again, isn't going to come back. Or it shouldn't. If it comes back, we've made a total mistake because the ratio of [expletive] around time to actual valuable time in that world is totally ridiculous. You know, and, and the opportunity cost that's created when you commit to be in a place. Then of course, there's the, there's there's the marginal cost of an extra attendee. The meeting room contains a finite number of people. You can't record the meeting. Well, you can, but nobody ever, it's not an interesting question, right? Okay.
So quite often, I'm in a Zoom meeting and somebody can't make it. I said, "Well, I'll record it. I'll send you the recording." Right? Now, we could have done that 20 years ago with physical meetings. I don't remember that happening once in 30 years at Ogilvy. I don't remember once with a pitch that I can, once remember a pitch being filmed because there was some senior guy from BT who couldn't make the pitch and he wanted to watch them. So he sent the video on. I can't remember, other than that one instance, I can't remember a single meeting being filmed so that people who couldn't make the time or the place could still effectively see what was discussed. I don't know why not. I mean, it wasn't as if it was technologically, but then you realize that most behavior is just guided by norms. We just do what everybody else does, and we do what we've done before. That's, I mean, that's 80% of behavioral sciences. Defaults, norms, and kind of habits drive the shadow.
Yeah, I love hearing your exploration in terms of new ideas and things that just appear to be blatantly obvious to you. I'm not, I'm not post-rationalizing here because I was a huge Zoom evangelist before lockdown, before we had COVID. I, I was getting the team to work Zoom Fridays because I said, "It's got to be beneficial to do this for one day a week. Let's start with one day a week, and maybe we'll decide to spread it into Mondays." But I said, "Apart from the house, it's not good being in an open-plan office for five days a week because variegated work arrives from variegated environments." And you know, and I said, you know, "Maybe some of you like being in the office four days a week, some of you like being in the office three. I don't think it's good for any of you to be in the office five days a week because it's just, it's too, it's too homogeneous an environment for you." You know, and actually, really, if you are, if you talk to creative people in advertising, they'll generally say that their most important ideas in their career emerged at a weird moment. So David Ogilvy dreamed one of them. Pepperidge Farm, the brand that still exists, they make those little goldfish and, you know, little bites. It's a bakery. He dreamed the idea for it. Somebody else had an idea. But when you look back on when suddenly you're struck with a new way of looking at something, it doesn't happen. It usually happens at an intermodal moment, actually.
So one thing I love about this, by the way, is when I stop this call, I'll go and empty the dishwasher. Now, that sounds like a really banal point. What's Sutherland? But actually, if you want to have an interesting idea, distracting yourself with some other seemingly mundane task isn't a bad technique. It's funny, I actually, uh, implore the exact same thing. I end up just doing the dishes, just the free association starts going.
You, you, it was funny, I was just exploring Ogilvy's book, *Ogilvy on Advertising*, just in preparation for this. I love some of his thinking. What do you feel is the most original idea you've had in your career?
Geesh. Okay. David said, "I only had six big ideas." Only, he means advertising ideas. He had many more than that. Um, but, um, advertising ideas. I was proud of some of the work I did which shows an early enthusiasm for what I didn't know was called behavioral economics. So there was a piece for American Express persuading large retailers to take American Express. And it was, this is years ago, but it's still one of the pieces I'm most proud of. And we sent them a hardback copy through the post of Jane Austen's *Pride and Prejudice*, which is not what you expect to receive if you're the finance director of a grocery multiple, okay? And they opened it up, and inside was just a bookmark which just listed 10 reasons why they didn't want to accept American Express: costs too much money, you know, it's too expensive, the fees are exorbitant, it will require huge technological and staff training. It just reiterated the reasons they didn't want to.
It was it. And then two days later, there was a copy of, um, *Sense and Sensibility*, I think. And that just made the point that actually the rate was as low as 1.5 percent, there wasn't any staff training required, they could switch it on in a week. And then there was finally, um, a third book arrived, which was *Persuasion* by Jane Austen, which just listed on the bookmark 10 reasons why they should meet a sales representative. And that signed up about 10 stores, including one mega-chain. So I think that's why to this day, I think American Express is accepted in Iceland in the UK. I'd like to think that's true, anyway. I hope it is. And, um, you know, when you think about the long-term value of that, by the way, multiplied by, uh, 20 years, stopped me. It paid back quite a few times.
And so, you know, that, that, in terms of my ad ideas, I think ideas like, "Why do you make trains faster?" solving for perception rather than solving for objective metrics. I think it's an important, I think it's a new idea, but I think it's important to publicize it. I think the idea I had that you could, uh, increase diversity in the workplace by hiring people in groups. I, I think that is truly original in the sense that, you know, I've been to people like Tim Harford, the economist, and a bunch of people who all agree that it's a good idea, and nobody's ever suggested it before. So the point I make is that when you hire one person at a time, you hire for conformity. You become very, very risk-averse, and you hire very conventionally. When you hire five people in a group, you, you go much broader, okay? Because when you hire 10 people, you accept the two of them are going to work out, okay, right? You know, you're not going to hire 10 people, they're all going to stay around for 20 years, okay? It's not just not going to happen. So you accept, okay, some of these won't work out. So let's take a bit of a punt. Let's go for a bit of upside here. And, uh, so in everything from gender diversity, ethnic diversity, cognitive diversity, and just background socioeconomic diversity. Idea of. And I think you can see it because organizations which hire in groups look for complementarity, and they look for variety. Organizations which hire one at a time have a very conformist, uh, notion of what they're looking for. And, um, so, you know, um, I think, you know, I think those ideas, ideas which are not only mine. I mean, hypothecation of taxes, so we would pay tax much more readily if taxes went to a specific, known cause rather than just disappearing into the law of the exchequer.
I think the other thing I'm proud of is not, is actually I'm also proud of insights, not ideas. And they're kind of cousins, okay? And insights either foster ideas or they help you breed them. So an insight into something can help you take an idea from one category and plant it into another. And so the, the insights I'm proud of are things like spotting the fact that Red Bull makes absolutely no sense, and that no one going through a conventional marketing process would ever have come up with that drink, okay? Because it failed in market research, and it completely fails all known forms of logic as to what kind of soft drink you should launch, which is, you say, okay, you want a soft drink to taste nice, have a reasonable price, and come in a big container so people get great value for money. And here you have the most successful soft drink of the last 40 years, and it comes in a tiny can, costs a fortune, and tastes disgusting.
The fact that Red Bull, Amazon Prime, Starbucks, Zoom, bottled water, Dyson, let me add a few more, uh, Amazon Prime, I might have mentioned, okay, I can list, uh, Gousto is another one, food kits. I can list literally 15 of the most important new companies. Uber, another one, okay, all of which are worth over a billion dollars. And in my view, Apple, chuck that one in. Okay. In my view, most of their distinctive success comes from them pursuing us, or or accidentally stumbling on a psychological quirk that defies rational analysis or conscious expression, okay? So nobody ever would have said, you know, nobody ever would have said, "Why isn't there a really disgusting tasting soft drink which costs too much and comes in a tiny can?" Okay? When they researched the taste, people said things, "I wouldn't drink this piss if you paid me to." But somehow they stumbled on the idea that if you make something seem like a medicine, not like a drink, a weird taste isn't a weakness, it's a strength. Because a different thing in a different context means something different. If it means something different, it arises a different emotional response. And if it arises a different emotional response, it drives a different behavior. In this case, purchase.
I'm really intrigued you talking about having those insights that end up leading to ideas. Have you ever, like, what that process is like for you?
The best description of it I've ever heard is, one, pretend you're a bit of a Martian. And so you look at things through very. There's a great phrase from the advertising guy, Howard Luck Gossage, when he said, "Whoever it was discovered water, it sure as hell wasn't a fish." Okay? And the point is, we don't notice the things in which we're immersed. We just think they're the way the world works, and we don't notice them. And having that ability to first of all zoom out and go, "Now that you think of it, this is really weird." Strangely, people who are slightly on the spectrum make very good social scientists because they've got to work it all out, you see. It's not instinctive. They've actually got to work out, "Why is it that an anorak is an unfashionable item of apparel?" You know, "I'm going to an interview. Why shouldn't I wear an anorak?" Do you, you probably don't have this stigma in the UK about anoraks.
I have no idea what that is.
Okay, okay. So anorak is, I think it comes from something like the Inuit or something, but it's basically a hooded, padded, warm coat. Now, interestingly, if it's Canada Goose, that's totally cool because it costs £600, okay? So it's a down-market version of Canada Goose, typically. And anorak was often a term of a program in British English for someone who was a nerd, okay? And the idea was it was someone with low social skills would somehow wear an anorak because they choose clothing on practicality, not on what it signified. I hope that makes sense. And so you'd have to explain to someone on the spectrum why you can't, I'm, I don't care what people wear. I don't read a lot into people's dress. But there's one thing that even gets me a bit wrong, which is wearing trainers to a wedding or a funeral, right, okay? Because that really, okay, you know, I get that not everybody has a perfect black suit, not everybody can afford this. But for some reason, on one or two occasions, I've seen people wearing trainers to a wedding, and I just go, "Oh, for [expletive] sake, you know, just, just make a [expletive] symbolic effort." You know, I know that trainers are more comfortable. It's the very fact that formal shoes are less comfortable which sort of signifies that you've made an effort about your attendance at this wedding, you see.
And so, you know, you have to explain to someone slightly on the spectrum why you shouldn't wear an anorak to a job interview, which you prop, which you probably shouldn't, okay? Because it would signify that you kind of hadn't made an effort to go and get a coat or something, you know, a black coat or something. It's, you know, I, I just wear what the [expletive] I like to work. But I didn't wear what the [expletive] I liked to my job interview because they didn't know me then, okay? And so my clothing is going to be a disproportionately high part of their, of their informational set. So that's why you make an effort for a job interview, which you might not, you know, I mean, someone who's established their credentials in advertising could wear an anorak, uh, you know, about year three, you could probably get away with it, okay? But you wouldn't do it in your first week at work. Um, and so understanding these kind of things is really interesting.
So you've got to look at it a bit from a slightly alien standpoint, which is why sometimes expats or, um, recent immigrants are particularly good at it because they notice the things that we don't notice. Okay? And stand-up comedians can also be very good at it because, as Jimmy Carr, the comedian, says, you know, comedy ultimately boils down to noticing things. You know, the ultimate skill of the comic is not only to come up with a joke, it's to notice things that nobody else has noticed before, because that's inherently funny. You know, their whole sketches of things. You know, I mean, it's not fashionable to like him, but I do quite like him. Michael McIntyre, who makes the point that when you water wine at a restaurant, they invite you to smell it to check that it's not off, right? No, he said, "Imagine if they do that with milk." So you order.
A cup of coffee, they come along with a milk jug, and they go, "I'm not quite sure about this belt. I think it might be off." And they hold it in front of your nose and go, "What do you think?" You go, "No, no, I think that's just about okay." And hit with wine, for some reason, it's a perfectly normal thing to do. And so, um, so, so it's a really, really interesting, I think this capacity. Now, there's a great entrepreneur. I thought this was me. Okay, I didn't realize that wasn't there. First, because this is my methodology, if you wanted it in a nutshell. And apparently, because I heard a talk the other night, there's some bloody billionaire investor who, I mean, he might have nicked it from me, I don't know. But I, I've said this before, my methodology is make a list of, or he, he refines it a bit. My methodology was make a list of all the assumptions people make in this particular market. Okay, there are a whole lot of assumptions which, okay, like no one will Dyson, no one will pay 700 for a vacuum cleaner. Nespresso, no one will pay 60 pence for a cup of coffee they make themselves at home. Okay, assumption, right? Okay, perfectly reasonable assumption. Okay, um, uh, what would it be? What would another example be? Well, in my childhood, bottled water. No one but the queen buys bottled water. Okay, which is literally the case. The queen travels with something called mold and water, but that's mainly because if you're on an international trip, you don't want to get the ships. Okay, but basically, if you bought bottled water in my childhood, you were a lunatic, or you were the queen. That was about it. Okay, so I think one shop in Monmouth sold bottled water. It was a delicatessen, and it's old malevolent water. I've got a vague memory, that was it. Okay, that was the bottled water category in 1979. Okay, so all those assumptions, you make a list of all those assumptions. Almost certainly, some of them aren't true. If you can spot the ones that aren't true, or, and this is the refinement from the other guy, the billionaire guy, or they won't be true in a year's time. It's a really clever refinement. Okay, they might be true now, but they're simply unsafe assumptions for two years hence, you know.
Um, and so anybody now looking at, you know, travel, hotels, etcetera, okay. Um, I mean, you know, one of the most interesting business ideas might be actually a working hotel, a business hotel where a group of, you know, a group of colleagues can actually go on holiday now, work together some of the day, work remotely, and have a bit of a holiday. You know, do we, you know, I mean, because genuinely, I have said this before, before Kevin, I said to my team, look, look, I know you won't do this because you'll think you're taking the piss, but if anybody wants to go to a beef, I'm actually not a beefer because then they're young people, they go all [ __ ] weird and stuff. I don't actually scratch the beef. Okay, but if you, if you want to go to somewhere respectable, if you want to go to Barbados, okay, for a week and work from there, because you don't need to attend any physical meetings and you think it would help, I don't care. You know, genuinely, nobody took advantage of that as far as I know. Um, people will. And so the whole thing is that the whole of business, humans have a very deep sense-making instinct. We love it when things make sense. And once we've got a model of the world that makes sense, we stop looking. We don't look any deeper. We don't look for refinements. We don't look for contradictions. We don't look for anomalies. We go, that's how the world works. Tube map. I know, I know it. And what that leaves, it always generates a whole series of rational-seeming assumptions about, you know, I mean, no one will buy the vacuum cleaner for 700 quid. Okay, Dyson. Oops. Right. Okay. And then as for a 400 pound hair dryer, right? That's just okay. I mean, if you'd come to me 10 years ago, I would have just, I would have had him escorted out of the building if he mentioned a 400 pound hair dryer. But he's a billionaire. We're not. You know.
And so, um, this, this kind of interesting stuff about find the, find the wrong-headed assumption. The other techniques I use, because I'm, I've discovered a great phrase just my previous Zoom call, which is, I'm not monotheistic, I'm polytheistic. Okay, I don't believe you should attempt to understand the whole world through a single, um, mental model or map. Okay. Another thing I find useful is Eli Goldratt's Theory of Constraints, which is, let's look at this like a whole system. Okay, let's try and understand the system, and let's find out where the constraint lies, because that's the place to intervene. If you've got a sales funnel, the bit of the sales funnel to widen is the bit that's the narrowest. Okay, there's no point in improving your advertising if your conversion is sub-optimal. And then other tools I use are things like Nassim Taleb's thing, Minority Rule, which emerged from a French physicist who was looking at human behavior. I think there's a toolkit of like 25, 30 things. They're probably a hundred, but I can only cope with plenty of ergodicity. That's a really interesting toolkit because you just go, maybe one times ten isn't the same as ten times one. Because, um, you know, I think that, um, Amazon Prime exists because of an understanding that, see that, um, Bezos had about, I don't think he called it ergodicity, but actually, okay, ten people don't mind paying three dollars for delivery once a month on Amazon. Right. And when he started, he's a bookshop. Right. So you just buy books, and most people don't buy more than two books a month. Okay. Lots of people buy one book a month, maybe, you know, book every two months, but most people don't buy four books a month. You've got to be pretty hardcore to do that. Okay, people do, but not many. Okay. Now, what he suddenly realized is that 100 people, or 10 people, right, when you're buying more things, you're not just buying books, you're buying CDs, you're buying, you know, bookshelves, you're buying hats, you're buying things. Okay. 10 people don't mind paying three dollars for delivery once a month, but one person won't pay three dollars for delivery 10 times a month. And I think what often happens is the information that's presented to business people is in aggregate average form. And the aggregate and the average, and the fact that it doesn't distinguish between 10 people doing something once and one person doing something 10 times, which is in certain realms of physics, you can say those are one and the same thing. Okay, but in most of real human life, the vast majority of life is actually path dependent. It's not ergodic. Okay. And therefore, um, you know, patently, even Bezos, I suspect he was probably worth a billion or so when he started Amazon Prime. He probably felt, even if you're a billionaire, it kind of sucks spending thirty dollars a month from delivery because when I'm spending 30 months on delivery, that's like a cable package. Was not a very good cable package, but you know what I mean? Yeah, I'm suddenly in a different territory here. I don't know. I'm spending 40 dollars a month with Amazon just on delivery. And so he created Amazon Prime, which is the genius way of "pay once, enjoy many times," which is a kind of loose, loosely, it's a sort of subscription model economics. Because economics is so unfriendly to marketing and psychology, that anything that isn't conventional economics has to be better than economics is at understanding people. So I'm interested in Austrian school economics. I'll read about, you know, um, you know, Ben Hayek, you know, anything that isn't this mainstream sodding, you know, model.
Um, uh, you know, I'm interested in. There's another interesting thing which I think is worth mentioning, which I can guarantee nobody in marketing has heard of, and that's, um, uh, it's called Service Dominant Logic, and it's pioneered by Vargo and Lush, I think, who are two academics. Um, but the idea is that all of economics has sprung up around the idea of the exchange of goods, whereas most economic activity is either literally or effectively the exchange of services. Okay. And because economics started with goods, its view of where value is created tends to be factory-focused, not experience-focused. And it tends to look at value being created remotely from the consumer, whereas in Service Dominant Logic, the consumer and the business work together in a form of an individual, sorry, a form of possibly unconscious cooperation to actually create value together. Interesting. I'm wondering, Rory, is this book number two? All of these tools, it could be. I've also wondered about writing a book about, we need metrics for human emotional states. Because what we tend to do is we look at human economic behavior, what do people buy? Okay, because it's easy to measure, because there's a dollar amount attached. And then we compare it to a lot of rational things like time and space and distance and weight and processing power and battery life. And we compare it to all the things in the in the objective world we can measure. And we try and establish a correlation between those two things. Now, the problem with that is often it's a spurious correlation, or it's a non-linear relationship, or actually, um, we're actually totally wrong about what. In other words, we're optimizing things that consumers generally don't care about. And my argument about that is, for example, Uber. Okay, the Uber map doesn't reduce your wait time in terms of duration. It doesn't do anything to the time you wait for your car. It fundamentally changes the psychological experience of waiting because it removes the level of uncertainty. So understanding that kind of thing, which is, okay, we have an SR unit for time. So every taxi firm, which would look at the data and go, there's a correlation between wait time and passenger satisfaction. And every company will then say, how can we reduce wait time? And they're actually focused on the wrong thing. They're focused on the objective reality, which is duration time measured in seconds. They're not focused on the metric that currently doesn't exist, which is the degree of pain and anxiety and uncertainty created by not knowing where your cab is. And so I think we need, we need better metrics if we're going to actually work out how marketing creates value. I googled the phrase the other day, "emotional efficiency." It doesn't really appear. Nobody uses it. No one's understood the concept of, no, no, it's not how efficiently you make something. It's how efficiently you generate the emotion in someone that they want to buy it. That's what business is. So businesses essentially set out to be operationally efficient, and then they see marketing as a cost because it lies downstream of manufacturing. Whereas, to quote Guy called Roe Alderson from 1957, we don't need an economic theory about the utility created by marketing. We need a marketing-based theory on the whole process of creating utility. And since the only thing worth generating as a result of your business activities is the desire in someone or some group of people's mind that this thing is worth buying, and that also you're worth buying from in future, and establishing a service-based relationship with, in many cases, not necessarily true of funeral plans or something, okay, but generally true. Okay, since that's the only purpose of the organization, what the hell are you doing on optimizing on many, many things which the consumer, probably including, by the way, low price, which the consumer doesn't care about nearly as much as you think. And then also everything that's a component of delivering the service, as very crudely defined by reductionist engineers, is viewed as a cost. And I see this in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is trying to eliminate humans from service delivery. Okay, but I would argue that looked at through Service Dominant Logic, the human being is often a significant component of the value generated by a service. A hairdresser's really about cutting hair, right? I think they're therapists. Yeah. Okay. Right. Doctors don't. I think hairdressers are therapists. Right. Now, Silicon Valley, I call this the Dorman fallacy. You know, you replace a hotel doorman with an automatic door, and you think you've done the job. But what you've done is you've defined the doorman in an incredibly narrow and functional way. And actually, doormen have about nine different functions. One of which, by the way, is recognition. Of your best guess. I know Americans who kind of stay at the Savoy, and the fact that the doorman greets them by name is probably the best part of the whole goddamn experience. Right. We did Royal Mail. Alex Batchelor, guy in the UK, who is Royal Mail. By the way, is quite cool because it's a company, it's now a private company, our shareholder, you know, company. And it dates to 1548. So it's one of the sort of, I don't know, 50 oldest businesses in the world. And they did some research on Royal brand attitudes to Royal Mail. Do you know the single biggest determinant of someone's attitude to Royal Mail was really simple? Whether they like their postman. And so, you know, a significant part of Royal Mail's service to me is not actually the transportation of goods. It's the fact that there's a guy who knows me, who I trust completely. I trust him to come into the house. I'll open the door for him without even, you know, just let him come into the house on the second floor. Um, okay, who I really like. Um, who I know will go to the extra mile to make sure I get my post. Okay. And the, the Silicon Valley approach to mail would involve some sort of robot thing. Right. Okay. Actually, am I really paying for the transfer? I mean, okay, hairdresser is a therapist. Doormen are providing security. Doormen are providing recognition. Doormen are hailing cabs. Doormen probably performed some slightly dodgy, borderline legal purchases on behalf of their guests. I wouldn't be sure, but I'm just, I'm just getting there. Okay. I've always assumed, you know, there's an element to that concierge doorman thing which is a bit, you know, it's probably drugs and prostitution going on a bit there, but let's be, you know, that's meant to be charitable. Okay. But the point is, you can't replace him with an automatic door opening mechanism because that's not where really where the value is created. Adopters, by the way, are doctors. Doctors are probably psychologists as much as, by the way, the principal business of a general practitioner in medicine is probably as much reassurance as it is treatment. So I learned this actually from Paul Dolan, London School of Economics. Do you know the, the single best analgesic, or rather, the first analgesic you should deploy, uh, when someone's suffering from any form of pain? A placebo. Well, actually, that is kind of a placebo. It's the word. Because, and the point is, a significant component of pain is, is created by the uncertainty that we don't know what it is. Okay. And if the doctor explains what is causing the pain, your levels of pain immediately drop. The levels of pain you experienced. Wrong. So there are hundreds of doctors all around the world, world, who a certain percentage of their value isn't just in basically prescribing the word "because." And obviously, you need some other words as well. You can't just go, "because." Okay. I, I, I, I'm exaggerating for effect here. But, but if you can explain what causes the pain, or you can simply say, when someone has a very bad illness, there's a lot of it about, their level of distress will drop dramatically. Because the best thing a doctor can say to you is basically, there's a lot of it about. The worst thing a doctor can generally say is, "I've never seen anything like this before. It's a case unknown to science." You know, that's what you really don't want to hear. And so, so, you know, you know, those things. It's like when you have a power cut at home, the first thing you do is go out of the door onto the street. And if you see the whole streets out, you're actually relieved, aren't you? Because you go, this happened two weeks ago to me. Yeah, yeah. You go out, the streets out, street's out of power. Oh, not really my problem. Someone else will have run, and I'll just wait for the power to come back. If it's only your house, you go, "Oh, [ __ ]." You know. Yeah.
I'm wondering, you were talking about some of these, these biases within Silicon Valley. Does Ogilvy take on specific young tech companies to, to reshape the way they're thinking about it from an earlier standpoint? Uh, we do it informally. Um, because I think it's really important. Because as Peter Thiel says, if you don't know how to sell your idea, you can have the best idea in the world, but if you haven't got enough, if you don't know how to sell it, what you've got is an invention or a gadget. You haven't got an innovation. Yeah. That's what. And, uh, he's very good. He's a great guy because he's a techie who understands marketing. And he, he greatly says, he says, nerds hate marketing. He goes, basically, they think it's kind of like impure or it's cheating or whatever. Because you want to impress your fellow nerds by out-engineering them, not by out-marketing them or out-selling them or, I, you know, okay. But nonetheless, he says, you have to pay attention to marketing because marketing works. It works on nerds, and it works on you. You know, and he's absolutely right about that. So I would love to do more of this. Because one of the great things about being paid by the hour is we, you know, the actual barriers to entry and the use of a behavioral science practice aren't as high as the use of an advertising agency or anything else. You know, and we do, we do quite like project work. And the reason we might like working with smaller entities is that you can learn things which you can then deploy on bigger entities. Because behavioral science is kind of fractal. You know, it works at all levels. And, um, uh, well, actually, that's one of the unsung merits of capitalism, which is it's kind of fractal. It works at the level of someone buying a loaf of bread, and it kind of works at the level of someone, you know, that most attempts to, most attempts to systematize the world don't scale. Um, and, um, so, so no, I mean, we would. And the great thing with the Zoom revolution is it doesn't require, you know, 7,000 pounds in transportation costs and a four-day trip to San Jose. You know, we can do this over Zoom. And we can add value. One of the things I'm thinking of doing is doing like a doctor's surgery where people have to pay a bit, but you pop in and you just ask a few questions for an hour. Yeah. You know, there's no reason why we can't sell ourselves that way now. Yeah.
No, it's almost like the idea, meeting up with those mentors and people who are retired, implementing that. Rory, I know we've got to wrap up here. Uh, final one for you. This is, this is always so interesting for me, exploring how you think. I would love to know, though, if you could sit down, spend the evening interviewing anyone, dead or alive, who would you like to choose? Oh, crikey. God. Um, Amos Tversky, among the dead, would have to be one of them. I think. Let me have a think. Fascinating, fascinating, fascinating. Right. Uh, anybody else? Obviously, they're obvious candidates like Jesus. And, um, woof. That is really, really interesting. People, or, or people I wish I'd met that I never did. Um, I should have thought of this in advance. Um, Adam Smith would have been a good one. Uh, I think Adam Smith comes keen. Any of those kind of Austrian school economists like Hayek and Von Mises and so forth. And, you know, the people who grasped the fact that economics was actually shouldn't be modeled on physics, that it needs, it needs systems thinking and ecosystem thinking, not physics thinking. And I think, you know, all those people that, you know, were, were getting close to that conclusion towards the end of their lives. And then, I suppose, the other thing would have been, I don't know, you know, you know, one day trip to the Manhattan Project or something like that would have been kind of cool. Actually, there's a guy who would have been really interesting, who's a worthwhile hero, by the way, which is not any of the kind of Nobel Prize winners at the Manhattan Project, but Leslie Groves, the guy who was, I think, General Leslie Groves, who ran it. Um, because it's also, it's always worth meeting people who have complimentary skills to your own. And as an administrator, that guy was clearly something else. I mean, he chose Oppenheimer to run it when Oppenheimer didn't even have a Nobel Prize. So it was a bit awkward making all these people who had Nobel Prizes report to a guy who didn't. Yeah. And so it's a really, really interesting question as to, you know, uh, because, you know, I think it's very, very easy for academics to disregard the value of real organizational genius. And I don't possess it in any measure whatsoever. So in some ways, you know, some of the people I'd most like to meet would be people who are just entirely complementary to my approach of thinking. Yeah. Groves is one of those, just absolute maestros, um, in terms of coordinating. Yeah. Absolutely.
No, I, I love this. Rory, the listeners know how much of a fan I am of you, your work. The book Alchemy was one of my top reads of all last year when it came out. So that'll obviously be linked up. Anywhere else you want them staying connected with you or what the team at Ogilvy is doing? Yeah, follow, um, Ogilvy Consulting will be consulting on Twitter. Follow me on Twitter at Rory Sutherland. And, um, uh, also, else, what else would I, yeah, um, I think there are about five or six areas of just decent inquiry like ergonomic economics. I think Service Dominant Logic. Um, if you find any of them boring, just move on to another one. But I think there are about six or seven heterodox schools of economics which have a huge amount to contribute in terms of reframing how you look at the world and how business works. And also how brands work as well. Um, I, I'm persistently maintained that because of this ergodicity debate, the chief value of brands to consumers is they're a reliable signal of non-crap-ness. It's not that we think that a brand produces the best thing in a category. It's that it reliably produces something that's not bad, or better. And, you know, that, by the way, is one of my, that, by the way, is one of the ideas or insights. I mean, I'm not sure which it is because there's a blurry relationship between them, but that's one of my ideas or insights which I think is most important. That actually quite often people pretend they're looking for the best, and what they're really doing deep down in their brain is trying to minimize the risk of bad to worse. And we need to understand that much better. By the way, Rory, if you ever put pen to paper and, and put some of your own thinking behind some of these key concepts, I would absolutely love to see that, um, and explore that a little bit further. I will, I will eventually get into a book. And there's, by the way, just the last little tip, one discovery I've made during lockdown, um, is that speaking is a hell of a lot faster than typing, even if you're a good typist. Okay. Now, you can't speak perfectly in fully informed sentences, I get that. But 90% of the work is just in the words. It's not in the editing. And editing is high-value creation work, whereas typing is low-value creation work. So the best discovery I made, other than that video conferencing works over time and at scale, is that buy a little voice dictation device or download the Otter.ai app on your mobile phone. The best thing to do is to record 10 minutes of speech. If you've got a thousand words to write, record 10 minutes of you speaking roughly what you want to say. Okay. It's not exactly the order you want to say it. It's not perfect. There are a few um's in it, and it's not punctuated, and it's not, um, uh, it's not laid out on the page very well. But record a thousand to twelve hundred words, upload that MP3 file to Otter.ai, wait ten minutes. It will then provide you with a transcript. Okay. Everything you want to say is there in the transcript. Okay. It's just a question of reordering it. So the reason I probably will write a second book is because I've discovered the joys of voice dictation and automatic transcription. Gotta love technology. A really interesting thought. Okay, if we continue talking for the rest of the day, okay, for another five hours or six hours, right? Now, okay, we would have enough text in the conversation for a hundred and ten thousand words in a hardback book. Now, it'd be a very weird book because we, you know, and it would have some really weird transcriptions in it where the word "aardvark" would suddenly appear for no readily, you know, apparent reason. But nonetheless, you can produce, if you were the world's most articulate, lucid man, you could produce a hardback book in a day. The only person who ever did this is Barbara Cartland. Did she, was she popular in the US or not? She was a romantic name. She was, she was the mother-in-law of the Prince of Wales, bizarrely, or it might have been the aunt-in-law or something. And she drank bottled water, and she was, she might have drunk bottled water, and she, she effectively, she wrote romantic novels, and she wrote about one a week. Okay. And the way she did it is she sat up in some huge fluffy negative in pink satin bed linen, and she had an amanuensis who just took dictation, and she'd lie in bed and dictate her novels to somebody else who wrote them down in shorthand. Okay. And she produced a book. Here, I think she's the most pub, she might be the most published writer in the English language. She certainly had the longest list of entries in Who's Who because in Who's Who, she insisted on listing every single goddamn book she'd written over the last 25 years. So her entry goes on for like a page and a half or something. I mean, they're pretty much garbage unless you like low-level romantic, uh, novels. That's probably unfair, actually. Um, I mean, I'm, you know, I'm not a huge fan of romantic novels. Um, I, I read one a year or something, but it's not, you know, just for the loans, but it's not my thing. But nonetheless, that's the level of productivity you can achieve if you dictate rather than typing. Huh. I think something we all have to explore a bit further. The technology's there. No reason not to do it. Yeah. Totally. By that. Absolutely right. Yeah. Just explore. Because most, Bill Gates once said, people don't know how to want the things we can offer them. And to be honest, I buy technology speculatively. It cost me quite a lot of money. But I go to be honest, I'm looking at this thing. Other people seem to, I will not know if it's any good or not until I've actually tried it out for a week. And by the way, I've fallen into an interesting thing. I write an article in The Spectator every fortnight. Um, about half the time I dictate it, half the time I write it. It's only 600 words, so it's not that tiresome to write. Believe me, writing a hundred thousand words is a royal pain in the ass. But, um, with 600 words, about 50/50, you know, one fortnight I'll dictate it, the next fortnight I'll type it. Don't know why. It's just how it works. Huh. Interesting.
Well, Rory, this is truly fascinating. I love exploring the mindset, uh, and just all of the things that you've uncovered recently. So I can't thank you enough for joining us on What Got You There. It's a huge pleasure. Anytime. Thank you very much. Sean Delaney, What Got You There with Sean Delaney. What [Music] Delaney.