#224 Rory Sutherland – Episode Notes

Key Takeaways

Rory talks about his fascination with video calling and the impact it has had on the workplace. He breaks down the problems with what is known as the ‘common’ office and how important autonomy is for people in their professions.

“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, is arguably more valuable to people than actually time off work”

When asked about his process for finding great insights, Rory breaks down his methodology. The commonality among the various methods in Rory’s process is to reframe your mindset and look at it from the perspective of an outsider.

“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”

When it comes to marketing, Rory believes that instead of focusing on the metrics that can be measured in numbers, marketers should be focused on measuring human emotion.

“It’s not how efficient you make something, it’s how efficient you generate the emotion in someone that they want to buy it”

5:24 The Problem With The White Collar Workforce

Rory explains how white collar employment doesn’t provide you with the same freedom as blue collar employment.

“I always think of white collar employees that most people retire because they’re sick of commuting not because they’re sick of work”

Rory explains that the reason pay is called compensation is because you sacrifice leisure for work.

Rory describes how the magic of Zoom and other video calling has contributed to changing the future of the workplace and his own personal worklife.

13:41 The Optimal Office

Rory describes the 3 parts that an office needs to include:

part library for people that work best in solitude and seclusion
part pub for maximizing social encounters
part for an ideation and creation area

“The problem is we designed the open plan office to be an average, and it’s neither solitude nor is it sociability”

Brainstorming

For brainstorming, Rory believes that companies should do two hour Zoom brainstorm sessions for immersion and then a five day break for fermentation.

When it comes to emails, Rory dives into the communication and productivity issues that emailing can create.

“One thing we often forget is that talking is a hell of a lot faster and easier than writing is”

Rory explains how he doesn’t place an agenda for a third of meetings because you never know what other people don’t know.

“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”

27:18 Talent Acquisition

Rory talks about how he is looking at the opportunity of recruiting retired people purely on an on-call basis. The knowledge and perspective of so many people who are retired is a great resource for current professionals to tap into, and with the technology we have today, reaching out to these people is possible wherever they are in their retirement.

Rory dives into the many costs of hiring someone to travel to give a talk and why a virtual call is more appealing.

“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 nill”

34:24 Rory’s Most Original Ideas

Rory talks about advertising projects from early in his career that he is proud of which he says “shows an early enthusiasm for what I didn’t know was behavioral economics”.

Rory describes one project he worked on that was persuading large retailers to take American Express. Rory sent the retailers a hardback copy of Pride and Prejudice and inside was a bookmark that listed ten reasons why they didn’t want to accept American Express. Two days after that he sent them a copy of Sense and Sensibility with a bookmark of why they should accept American Express, and the third book that Rory sent retailers was Persuasion which listed ten reasons why they should be sales representatives.

Among the other ideas that Rory is proud of, is why he believes you can increase diversity in the workplace by hiring people in groups.

“Organizations which hire in groups look for complementarity and variety, organizations which hire one at a time have a very conformist notion”

40:27 Rory’s Process for Great Insights

Rory says that we should all look at ourselves like a martian in order to notice the things that we may not realize because we are immersed within them.

Rory lists his methodology:

Make a list of all the assumptions people make in this particular market.
Spot the assumptions that aren’t true or that won’t be true in a year’s time
Look at the world through more than one mental model
Understand the system and find out where the constraint lies because that’s the place to intervene – Eli Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints
Read Heterodox Economics
Understand Service Dominant Logic

“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”

53:15 Metric For Human Emotional States

Rory explains how we tend to measure human economic behavior as what people buy because of the dollar amount attached. Using Uber as an example, Rory says that instead of focusing on cutting down the wait time for a car that is measured in seconds, the focus should be shifted to looking at the psychological change that occurs within customers while they are waiting for their car.

“It’s not how efficient you make something, it’s how efficient you generate the emotion in someone that they want to buy it”

Rory talks about how Silicon Valley is trying to eliminate humans from service delivery, and why he argues that looking at it from service dominant logic, “the human being is often a significant component of the value generated by a service”

1:00:56 How Ogilvy Reshapes Tech Companies

Rory talks about how Ogilvy helps to reshape tech companies. He references Peter Thiel and his quote, “You can have the best idea in the world but if you don’t know how to sell it what you’ve got is an invention or gadget, you haven’t got the innovation”

“We do quite like project work, the reason we like working with smaller entities is that you learn things which you can then deploy on bigger entities”

1:03:13 Rory’s Choice For An Evening Of Interviews

Rory names a few people for whom he would love to spend an evening interviewing.