one of my favorite rory sutherland anecdotes is about how people complained that an elevator took too long to arrive. it would cost ~ a million dollars to make the elevators 5% faster. they solved the problem for ~$100 by adding mirrors so people groomed themselves while waiting
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A few weeks later, when another senior engineer quit, I said, "Screw it, let's go buy an espresso machine." So Jonathan and I went online and bought this super-duper Italian, fully automatic, $15,000 espresso machine on his credit card and submitted the expense form. The CFO almost had a baby. It was unbelievable. This was a beautiful pie
... See moreIn the early 1990s, the cleaning staff at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam installed a small sticker that looked like a fly near the center of each urinal. Apparently, when men stepped up to the urinals, they aimed for what they thought was a bug. The stickers improved their aim and significantly reduced “spillage” around the urinals. Further analysis
... See moreWhy the disconnect? I think there's a general principle at work here: the less energy people expend on performance, the more they expend on appearances to compensate. More often than not the energy they expend on seeming impressive makes their actual performance worse. A few years ago I read an article in which a car magazine modified the "spo
... See moreHis observation was that you could massively improve the quality of a product by resolving a tiny fraction of the problems.