Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

by Rory Sutherland

The human mind does not run on logic any more than a horse runs on petrol.

Fact

if we allow the world to be run by logical people, we will only discover logical things. But in real life, most things aren’t logical – they are psycho-logical.

Fact

why are 95 per cent of all toothpastes flavoured with mint?

My curse

We are wrong about psychology to a far grater degree than we are about physics, so there is more scope for improvement.

Fact

It’s true that ‘what gets measured gets managed’, but the concomitant truth is ‘what gets mismeasured gets mismanaged’. One great problem with metrics is that they destroy diversity because they force everybody to pursue the same narrow goal, often in the same narrow way, or to make

Fact

give people a behaviour and they’ll have no problem supplying the reasons themselves.

Whoa!