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