Rory Sutherland

*The Beverly Wilshire Hotel has a system where the driver of your Lincoln Towncar furtively texts ahead to the hotel to announce your impending arrival. This meant that, even though I had never been there before in my life, the staff opened my car door for me with the words: “Welcome to the Beverly Wilshire, Mr Sutherland.” This was so cool I nearl

they were too busy going: “well you can get a 5am

To put a value on the digital world by only tallying the money that changes hands is a little like trying to place a value on sex by simply measuring the amount spent on prostitution.

If you want a long-lived brand, avoid strategy altogether — instead have an Ideal (like Nike, Apple) or an executional device (Andrex, The Economist). Anything with a strategy is doomed never to outlive your client. Discuss.

To use a phrase popularised in a famous FT article: great brands are often built obliquely. They are generally a by-product of something (ideals, vision, focus) and not a product of anything.

What it seems to show is that people are overwhelmingly intentionalists, not consequentialists. In other words, once they suspect an individual’s intentions are largely self-interested, it colours how they perceive the outcome. Hence they are far readier to attribute a bad outcome to self-interested behaviours than a beneficial one.

This is why, fairly early on, Microsoft placed whiteboards along the corridors on the Redmond campus; for they found that the accidental meetings which took place in hallways were in fact more productive than the scheduled ones which happened in meeting rooms.

Minor irritations are really worth focussing on because unlike things like health care, they’re relatively cheap to solve and the difference they make to the quality of life may be enormous.

arbitrary. Even relatively worthy successes such as Google’s or Microsoft’s may be as much the result of lucky timing as anything else. Instead, capitalism is at its indisputable best not when picking but when picking off. In unerringly killing off the bad: the inefficient, the redundant, the outdated or the needlessly complex.