Few people are as good at framing ideas as Rory Sutherland. In a talk he gave at the SprintAd-dagen in March of 2019, Rory opened up with the following thoughts on the role of luck and experimentation under capitalism:
“You’ve got to leave enough money free and you got to enough eccentric things to give yourself the change to be lucky…
One of the reasons that a lot of people don’t like capitalism is that some of the people who do very well under capitalism are actually total idiots. They happen to stumble into a business at exactly the right industry at the right time. They got lucky.
And even spectacularly intelligent people, I think we can argue…I don’t think there is any argument that Gates and Jobs are hugely intelligent….they were both spectacularly lucky as well as being hugely intelligent…partly by accident of their birth.
If you notice, a lot of those people, Ellison, Gates, Jobs – the giants of the tech industry – were all born within about 18 months of each other. And there was a tiny moment where you had to be young to make it in tech. Five years earlier and they would have ended up working for IBM. Five years later and it would have been to late.
One of the important things about capitalism, interestingly, is that it is a mechanism for rewarding people simply for being lucky. And the strangest thing about that is that it is precisely that, that makes people so angry about capitalism.
But if you don’t have a mechanism that rewards luck, the majority of great discovery don’t get banked.
If you look at the history of science, there is probably as much you can attribute to lucky accidents… Penicillin, Viagra, for example…the two wonder drugs. Those were both a product of completely lucky accidents.
The discovery of vaccination was just one man that happened notice that milk maids didn’t get smallpox. It’s just those tiny things that can have huge effects and we need to leave enough space to actually be lucky.
And the very strength of capitalism is precisely that it rewards ideas that at first make no sense.“
Here at How to Value Stuff, we are all great admirers of Rory Sutherland. Rory is the head Ogilvy Advertising – founded by David Ogilvy, another man we greatly admire. David wrote a legendary book on marketing and sales, called Ogilvy on Advertising – and one of the most influential advertising professionals in the world today.
Here are 10 rules you can adopt which will help you profit by being less logical than everybody else:
1. The Opposite of a Good Idea can be another Good Idea
Nobody can blame you for getting at a single right answer regardless of the materials you used to get there. Conventional logic uses the idea of a single right answer. This is mostly needed where your job is in the line and you need to make everything right.
When it comes to driving at a single right answer, no subjectivity is involved in decision making and what you decide is what you deem right.
2. Don’t Design for Average
Solving a problem with an average person in mind is very difficult. Some models in conventional logic require you to solve a problem for people in aggregate. This can make problems very difficult to solve.
Do not limit yourself to the average person and focus on the fringes. That way, it is easy to find things that will be adopted by extreme consumers. They can then be ploughed back in the mainstream.
3. It Doesn’t Pay to be Logical if Everybody Else is being Logical
Being logical in business will get you to the same place just like everybody else. In business strategy, it does not pay to be logical because being logical will get you to the same place where your competitors are going. In business, you need to be differentiating yourself away from your competitors.
Find out what your competitors are logically wrong about. If you find out what is wrong with their model, you are in a position to exploit it. Adopt contrarian thinking.
4. Our Attention affects Our Experience
The nature of our attention affects the nature of our experience. Quality is relative. The perception of quality is determined by the difference between expectations and experience. It is more difficult to change how a person experiences something than the expectation of that experience.
Rory gives an example of one of the best hotels he has stayed in. The hotel had previously been a prison or a police station. Everything from the bed and bathroom to the TV and wall hangings was very spartan nature.
Under most circumstances, you normally would have experienced this as a lack of quality. But the hotel was in East Berlin and the experience came across as authentic East Berlin. It fit the circumstances. It met what you would have expected from an authentic East Berlin hotel.
5. If there were a Logical Answer We would have found it Already
If a problem becomes persistent even after discussing it with every person who can relate to it, it means you are giving it a logical explanation. There is a solution somewhere to be found through conventional linear rationality approach.
Exposing everything to logic and the problem persists, it indicates that logic is not the answer to that problem. Gather some courage and test less rational solutions. Context is a marketing superweapon.
6. The problem with Logic is it Kills off Magic
Logic and magic cannot coexist. There is no magic where logic is involved. The rules of logic demand that there can be no magic.
Logic requires that you change your product instead of improving the perception of the product in order to enhance the customer experience. This confines you into doing exclusively objective things because you think that people perceive the world objectively.
7. A Good Guess which stands up to Empirical Observation is still Science
You should not let methodological purity restrict your capability of coming up with multiple solutions. It is good to allow solutions that come in randomly rather than being restricted to explainable solutions. The latter will hold you captive and will monopolize your progress.
8. Test Counterintuitive Things because Nobody Else will
Since you do not want to put your source of livelihood on the line, create a space in your business where you can test things that do not make sense. This will be an advantage to win over your competitor because your experiment will land you in a lucrative business idea that will make you outdo your competitors.
9. Don’t Solve Problems using only Rationality
Solving problems using only rationality is like playing golf using only one club. Using rationality as the only way of solving a problem will get your solution based on a very narrow path.
Solving problems by using only rationality will generate solutions that restrict themselves to a very narrow definition of human motivation and how they think, act and decide.
10. Dare to be Trivial
Sometimes big problems do not require huge intervention. On the contrary, a small thing can have an enormous effect. You do not have to do things in the correct order simply because it is the way they should be done. Small changes, such as alternating the order of options or changing relative scales, can yield an order of magnitude in results.
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