Rory's Bio

Rory Sutherland is the Vice Chairman of Ogilvy, an attractively vague job title which has allowed him to co-found a behavioral science practice within the agency. Before founding Ogilvy Change, Rory was a copywriter and creative director at Ogilvy for over 20 years, having joined as a graduate trainee in 1988. He has variously been President of the IPA, Chair of the Judges for the Direct Jury at Cannes, and has spoken at TED Global. He writes regular columns for the Spectator, Market Leader and Impact, and also occasional pieces for Wired. He is the author of two books: The Wiki Man, available on Amazon at prices between £1.96 and £2,345.54, depending on whether the algorithm is having a bad day, and Alchemy, The surprising Power of Ideas which don't make Sense, to be published in the UK and US in March 2019.

Buy the book, Transport for Humans.

What we covered in this episode:

What Rory thinks of Orlando’s new book
The danger of big data, economic theory and the assumption of ergodicity
The strangeness of focus groups
Why we’re all trying to project the ‘right answer’ in public forums
Why reading novels makes you more attractive to the opposite sex
The appeal of true live crime to women
Why we should switch mile per hour to minutes per hour
Are we nearly there yet? The behavioural science of transport
What trains should always leave 2mins late
Why we all need a season ticket from the Isle of White to go anywhere in first class
Why going first class should be based on length of service rather than status
How Brexit is good for employee benefits
How the invention of the tube transformed working class access to jobs
How the breakthrough happens when you’re doing what everyone else isn’t doing
Lucozade Energy and how the perception of change is worse than the actual change
The real WHY and the hidden WHO
Better for the reputation to fail conventionally than succeeds unconventionally
The safe course of action in corporate life is always to be boringly conventional
Quality of reasoning isn’t quality of outcome
What every second hand car salesman knows
The case for making decisions when drunk
How behaviourial science can save the planet
Never solve a problem based on the average
Why we should be able to choose our own contribution to the climate crisis
The climate case for a vintage Aston Martin - known as the Kazzoom-brooks postulate
The case for choosing premium brands over cheap ones
What you can learn from the 4th man in Wales to own a dishwasher
Why you shouldn’t post a picture of your car in social media
Changing the currency of status signalling to solve climate crisis
Rory’s favourite ad campaign of the past 10 years
The case for Germany as a tourist destination
Why VW should have put cup holders in their cars in the US
What we can learn from the German approach to the environment
Why we shouldn’t politicise the environment otherwise it creates reputational loss
Why winning an argument and holding attention are not the same thing

Planet saving Aston Martin’s and Transport for Humans - Rory Sutherland, Ogilvy

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