YouSaid · the spoken record

Rory Sutherland

lines on the record: 160
first: 2025-12-09
most recent: 2025-12-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I will a lovely story to illustrate this, which I think is fantastic. It's the absolute perfect example of misalignment of optimization through quantification bias. So wonderful man, Alex Bachelor, used to be the marketing director of Royal Mail, you know, similar to what you have with Canada Post, USPS.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's very, very easy. Management consulting firms, if you're in a business and some management consultants come in, go to the management and say, are they on a game share agreement? A gain share agreement is a management consulting scam where you claim a certain percentage of the cost savings you identify in year one. How is Roger L. Martin, your fellow Canadian and my own personal Fengali says, any idiot can cut costs, okay? What takes real skill is cutting costs in a way that doesn't destroy value. One of the things that I don't think is understood by tech nerds if I'm being really cruel, males in general in many cases, is the extent to which in evaluating any business or experience, the human component of it, the face-to-face component, does really, really heavy lifting.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then they walk away, they take the credit for the cost saving, and then two years later, you know, now it tells a catastrophe. The rack rates fallen off a cliff because the doorman was doing multiple things, many of which were human and kind of tacit security would be one. You know, there are no vagrants to sleep in the doorway, hailing taxis, dealing with luggage, recognizing regular guests, providing status to the hotel. There are loads and loads of value creation components to that doorman, which aren't captured in the open the door definition.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's a very beguiling message because it usually comes with cost savings attached. You might have heard of my thing, the Dorman Fallacy, did you? I'll remind the viewers and listeners, which is simply that you have a hotel, it's a five-star hotel, it has a dormant, someone who welcomes incoming guests. A combination of, say, McKinsey or Accenture and a tech firm will come in and say your dormant currently costs you $X,000 a year. We have defined his or her function as opening the door. We will replace said Dorman with automatic door opening mechanism and an infrared human detector. And we'll save you $30,000, $40,000 a year.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We usually do in the sense that when you pursue efficiency, there are quite a few problems. But when you pursue efficiency, generally you start looking at numerical or mechanical factors. And of course, in the process, you disregard psychological factors where the greater gains may be found. And so you focus too heavily on cost reduction and too little on value creation. I mean, one of the greatest forms of efficiency, by the way, is employing a human being who's really, really nice. Now this is complete anathema to people in tech who love to define business processes so as to make them susceptible to automation. You know, person X does this. We will take that function. We will replace it with algorithm Y.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's a kind of decoy effect, a bit like the famous economist experiment with the decoy effect. So, you know, one of my interesting questions is, you know, what interface will AI deploy to help us make choices? And will it make the mistake that you could very easily make? If you think about it, nobody clicks the I'm feeling lucky button on Google. I think it's still there, isn't it? It's been there for years, and they've removed it and found that it slightly reduces the appeal. But the number of people who actually click it, i.e. I'm feeling lucky, take me straight to a single page, is vanishingly small. People want to choose between, you know, effectively above the fold options. And, you know, I'm just intrigued because it's very, very easy, I think, for people with an economic or tech background to make assumptions about what people are trying to do and how they choose and that where utility maximizes and all this kind of thing only really.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Among real estate agents, there's apparently a kind of little bit of a trick, which is you always, before you show someone the house, you want to sell them, you show them a less appropriate house, ideally that's slightly more expensive, say, so that when they see the house that you want to sell them, it's now clear-cut because they can say, ooh, it's a bit cheaper than the other one, and it's got a conservatory.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Following Farnham Devotedly And it's always, always interesting, very, very interesting. And I mean, the whole question of the decision sciences is, I think, at the moment completely critical. And actually, by the way, it'll be very, very interesting with AI. Because I keep hearing people saying, you will say to your AI, find me a skiing holiday, and it will provide you with a perfect skiing holiday. And I keep saying people don't decide like that. At the very least, you'll have to show them three or four or five skiing holidays from which they choose. Because we can't really choose in the absence of comparison. Do you see what I mean? It's a sort of freakish element of free market capitalism, which is we can only like something if we choose it in preference to something else.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We must be able to dig out the original content presumably. What was it? It was your podcast number 47 or something, was it?”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Keep hearing people saying, You will say to your AI, find me a skiing holiday, and it will provide you with a perfect skiing holiday. And I keep saying, people don't decide like that. When you allow Tech Bros too much power over decision making, along with their running dog lackeys in kind of management consultancy, you're optimizing for something which may be very, very distant from what your real world customers really care about.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source