As an aside, American government buildings are the only buildings on the world where lavatories and washrooms are often not stacked above each other on successive floors — a universal practice in the private sector where it serves to minimise plumbing. The reason? The US government pays builders and plumbers by the hour, not by the job.

When you are accustomed to living life at an online pace, you live in a world where every action results in an immediate response. Click on the link and, after just a few seconds, up comes the page. Hence when you order a coffee and 10 minutes later it hasn’t arrived, your first response is no longer. “Gosh, they must be quite busy!” No, your

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.

cite this new paint as an example of “feedback” — the notion that people will make better choices when their decisions have rapidly visible results.

Sales promotion agencies (the good ones) are familiar with this approach… that of: “make people buy and hopefully they’ll love you” rather than “make people love you and hopefully they’ll buy.” Their philosophy needs to be as much at the heart of what we do as any other.

burdens imposed on workers by the owners of land. Magie

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.

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.

What you actually find is that if you do good science rather than bad science, if you accept that actually this is seduction not persuasion, that it’s much more oblique than clients and researchers like to think, that reason plays a much smaller part in it than people realise.