Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life
Rory Sutherlandamazon.com
Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life
And in reality ‘context’ is often the most important thing in determining how people think, behave and act: this simple fact dooms many universal models from the start.* Because in order to form universal laws, naïve rationalists have to pretend that context doesn’t matter.
Rory Sutherland • Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life
People are much more comfortable attributing the success of a business to superior technology or better supply-chain management than to an unconscious, unspoken human desire.
Rory Sutherland • Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life
psycho-logic as a neutral and non-judgemental term. I
Rory Sutherland • Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life
Perhaps advertising agencies are largely valuable simply because they create a culture in which it is acceptable to ask daft questions and make foolish suggestions.
Rory Sutherland • Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life
Imagine you are a company whose product is not selling well. Which of the following proposals would be easier to make in a board meeting called to resolve the problem? a) ‘We should reduce the price’ or b) ‘We should feature more ducks in our advertising’. The first, of course – and yet the second could, in fact, be much more profitable.
Rory Sutherland • Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life
The psychological complexity of human behaviour is reduced to a narrow set of assumptions about what people want, which means they design a world for logical rather than psycho-logical people.
Rory Sutherland • Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life
Unfortunately, many of your friends and colleagues, and most of all your finance director or your bank manager, won’t like any of these new non-sensical ideas, even the valuable ones. That’s not because they are expensive – most of them are very cheap indeed. No, he* will hate them because they don’t sit comfortably with his narrow, reductive world
... See moreRory Sutherland • Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life
Remember, if you never do anything differently, you’ll reduce your chances of enjoying lucky accidents.
Rory Sutherland • Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life
Solving problems using rationality is like playing golf with only one club.