Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

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You might think that people instinctively want to make the best decision, but there is a stronger force that animates business decision-making: the desire to not get fired or blamed. The best insurance against blame is to use conventional logic in every decision. After a spell teaching at a grammar school (and finding his colleagues far more challenging than the pupils), Rory applied to a number of advertising and marketing agencies and was offered a planning role by Ogilvy & Mather. He was asked to leave the Planning Department and moved to the Creative Department instead as a junior copywriter. He worked on accounts including American Express, Royal Mail, and the relatively obscure software company Microsoft. Even when designing for the able-bodied, it is a good principle to assume that the user is operating under constraints (e.g. injured, hands fulls etc).

The greatest hope for a brighter future lies in adapting transport to more human wants and needs. Behavioural science has immense potential to improve the design of vehicles, roads, railways, planes and pavements– as well as the ways in which we use them – but only when we embrace the messier reality of how people travel. It’s not just from trains that Sutherland finds examples of the curious ways in which humans operate. His razor-sharp sense of observation provides him with a rich source of anecdotes on which to draw. His collection rivals that of Richard Thaler who outlined a list, in his book Misbehaving, of things people do that are inconsistent with the economists’ model of rational choice. The regular practice of religion helps poor people move out of poverty. Regular church attendance, for example, is particularly instrumental in helping young people escape the poverty of inner-city life. He questions whether people use toothpaste for dental hygiene, or whether they really use it to maintain fresh breath – the reason why the vast majority of the toothpaste sold in the world is mint-flavoured. JP Morgan once said, ‘A man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason.’ Rory Sutherland extrapolates that huge social benefits can be garnered by appealing to people’s selfish instincts. The widespread adoption of soap hundreds of years ago fostered all the benefits of public hygiene and cleanliness but at the individual level it was adopted by people because it made them smell nice. By the same token concern about polar bears today may cut it for 10% of the population, but the majority want to see some personal upside from adopting more environmentally conscious behaviours. In nature it is often necessary for something that can't be faked. Information is free, sincerity is not.A breakthrough book. Wonderfully applicable to everything in life, and funny as hell.’ Nassim Nicholas Taleb Buy two copies of this book in case one is stolen. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, scholar and former trader; author of the Incerto.

One might think many animals will adopt and change their color to surrounding so as to hide from predator. However, there are few insects/worms which have adopted to be very brightly and lively colored which makes them easily visible even from far distances. This should make them easy prey in the wild?? … maybe not. It’s a costly signalling but it works, Advertising adds value to a product by changing our perception, rather than the product itself. Rory Sutherland makes the daring assertion that a change in perceived value can be just as satisfying as what we consider “real” value -- and his conclusion has interesting consequences for how we look at life. Major markets have banned/rejected vaping/e-cigarettes although its better replacement. Its difficult to get a man understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. – Good quote from Cedric Villani, mathematician and winner of a Fields Medal: "There are key two steps a mathematician uses. He uses intuition to guess the right problem and the right solution and then logic to prove it."The author successfully proved that conventional logic and wisdom fails more than what people think through many real life examples in the book. The central message of the book is that "No one knows anything!". Even Physicists who are Nobel Laureates managed to invent/proved their work through a large element of serendipity and accidents. We don't value things, we value their meaning. What they are is determined by the laws of physics, but what they mean is determined by the laws of psychology. Rory Sutherland 2022-10-28T12:45:47.000Z Sensationally good book, and with an audiobook read by the co-author... @brianchristian - always better. Complex plans are designed to compensate for small vision or low self-esteem… The world is chaotic and complex — don’t try to cram the infinite detail of the real world into one neat grid.” 4. Design your future

Delightful read. Breezy and irreverent. The author talks about scenarios where a purely "logical" approach can lead to worse outcomes for business. Design is about having a go — trying something and seeing what happens. Planning is how to try — you plan for things to happen as they should, rather than designing to turn them into something else.” 5. Understand that branding is everything Here's a good quote: "Behaviour comes first; attitude changes to keep up." That flies in the face of convention that attitudes drive behavior. Give people recycling bins and require them to separate...they probably become more environmentally aware. He says "Give people a reason and they may not supply the behaviour; but give people a behaviour and they'll have no problem supplying the reason themselves.

Its difficult to reply with “tap water” when you are being asked by waiter “Still or Sparking water?” AND WHILE I AM HERE: there's a chapter on the placebo effect which says perfectly sensible things about exploiting the effect for everyone's benefit (eg why not colour aspirin red, because it feels more dramatic to take red pills) and then suggests that for the same reason we should encourage the use of homeopathy. That just sums this book up--Mr. Too Clever For Logic apparently can't see any difference between better marketing of an effective product and selling something as medicine when we know for a fact it doesn't work. There is a point where marketing becomes active dishonesty and this careers over it. More from the Introduction - and why I was wondering if I'd ever get out of it - Sutherland has a subsection of a subsection where he warns "Be careful before calling something nonsense." Ordinarily, ,that might be good advice, but he explains with an example of a "1996 survey on the place of religion in public life in America [he's British]" by the Heritage Institute that found 1. Churchgoers are more likely to be married, less likely to be divorced or single and more likely to manifest high levels of satisfaction in their marriage.