Alchemy Quotes

“It wouldn’t matter much if only Goldman Sachs, say, or a few elite institutions used this criterion, but when everyone else copies the same approach, it is ludicrous. Since almost half of graduates should by definition fall below this hurdle, it will either result in thousands of people spending three years at university for no benefit or to grade inflation in universities, with degree classes becoming meaningless.* This is another example of people not using reason to make better decisions, but simply for the appearance of being reasonable.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“Food has become remarkably inefficient, and the pill-promoting futurists of the 1960s would be astonished to see how wrong they were. People spend hours preparing it, eating it and watching television programmes about it. People cherish local ingredients, and willingly pay a premium for foods produced without chemical fertilisers. By contrast, when we made the food industry logical, we lost sight of the reasons we value food at all.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“seems astonishing now, but the predictions of the future I read as a child assumed that meals would be replaced by parcels of nutrients consumed in handy tablet form – it was for some reason thought that the purpose of food was to provide the necessary minerals, vitamins, protein and energy, and that the job of the food industry was to supply them in as efficient a form possible. Some forward-thinking people had defined food’s function narrowly, in order to create a rational model of what the food industry should do.* In this focus on scale and efficiency, people lost sight of what food is for; while it is, of course, a form of nourishment, it also serves a host of other ends. The proponents of delivering food in pill form had lost sight of the fact that it is enjoyable to eat and a necessary prop at social occasions.* Even if such pills could be produced, it is perfectly plausible that people who ate only such food would be utterly miserable.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“When you demand logic, you pay a hidden price: you destroy magic. And the modern world, oversupplied as it is with economists, technocrats, managers, analysts, spreadsheet-tweakers and algorithm designers, is becoming a more and more difficult place to practise magic – or even to experiment with it. In what follows, I hope to remind everyone that magic should have a place in our lives – it is never too late to discover your inner alchemist.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“The mythical ‘butterfly effect’ does exist, but we don’t spend enough time butterfly hunting. Here are some recent butterfly effect discoveries, from my own experience: A website adds a single extra option to its checkout procedure – and increases sales by $300m per year. An airline changes the way in which flights are presented – and sells £8m more of premium seating per year. A software company makes a seemingly inconsequential change to call-centre procedure – and retains business worth several million pounds. A publisher adds four trivial words to a call-centre script – and doubles the rate of conversion to sales. A fast-food outlet increases sales of a product by putting the price . . . up. All these disproportionate successes were, to an economist, entirely illogical. All of them worked. And all of them, apart from the first, were produced by a division of my advertising agency, Ogilvy, which I founded to look for counter-intuitive solutions to problems. We discovered that problems almost always have a plethora of seemingly irrational solutions waiting to be discovered, but that nobody is looking for them; everyone is too preoccupied with logic to look anywhere else. We also found, rather annoyingly, that the success of this approach did not always guarantee repeat business; it is difficult for a company, or indeed a government, to request a budget for the pursuit of such magical solutions, because a business case has to look logical.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“The reason this inefficient process is necessary is because most of the achievements of consumer capitalism were never planned and are explicable only in retrospect, if at all.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“The same is true of scientific progress. It is easy to depict a discovery, once made, as resulting from a logical, and linear process, but that does not mean that science should progress according to neat, linear and sequential rules.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“I have a soft spot for the religious practice of saying grace before a meal, since paying attention to good things that one might easily take for granted seems a good approach to life – a pause to focus attention on a meal should add to its enjoyment.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“Strangely, as we have gained access to more information, data, processing power and better communications, we may also be losing the ability to see things in more than one way; the more data we have, the less room there is for things that can’t easily be used in computation. Far from reducing our problems, technology may have equipped us with a rational straitjacket that limits our freedom to solve them.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“At its worst, neo-liberalism takes a dynamic system like free market capitalism, which is capable of spectacular creativity and ingenuity, and reduces it to a boring exercise in ‘how we can buy these widgets 10 per cent cheaper’. It has also propelled a narrow-minded technocratic caste into power, who achieve the appearance of expert certainty by ignoring large parts of what makes markets so interesting.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“Here’s Ogilvy’s contemporary, Bill Bernbach: ‘Human nature hasn’t changed for a million years. It won’t even change in the next million years. Only the superficial things have changed. It is fashionable to talk about the changing man. A communicator must be concerned with the unchanging man – what compulsions drive him, what instincts dominate his every action, even though his language too often camouflages what really motivates him.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“It is harder to like something when you haven’t chosen it.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“People who are not skilled at mathematics tend to view the output of second-rate mathematicians with an high level of credulity, and attach almost mystical significance to their findings. Bad maths is the palmistry of the twenty-first century.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“All too often, what matters is not whether an idea is true or effective, but whether it fits with the preconceptions of a dominant cabal.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

“prejudice depends on context;”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

“If you want to solve the problem, you have to understand ‘the real why’.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

“After all, no big business idea makes sense at first. I mean, just imagine proposing the following ideas to a group of sceptical investors: ‘What people want is a really cool vacuum cleaner.’ (Dyson) ‘. . . and the best part of all this is that people will write the entire thing for free!’ (Wikipedia) ‘. . . and so I confidently predict that the great enduring fashion of the next century will be a coarse, uncomfortable fabric which fades unpleasantly and which takes ages to dry. To date, it has been largely popular with indigent labourers.’ (Jeans) ‘. . . and people will be forced to choose between three or four items.’ (McDonald’s) ‘And, best of all, the drink has a taste which consumers say they hate.’ (Red Bull) ‘. . . and just watch as perfectly sane people pay $5 for a drink they can make at home for a few pence.’ (Starbucks)*”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“Why we need to spend more time and energy hunting for butterfly effects. Large organisations are not set up to reward creative thinking. As the chart shows, the greatest risks result from an imaginative approach, so it seems safer to act logically. However, it is the job of the alchemist to explore the upper half of this chart occasionally – and managers should give their staff permission and unwavering support when they do so.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

“Imagine you have turned up at somebody’s home to look at a second-hand car. You assess the condition of the car, which is parked on the street, and having decided it is worth £4,000, you ring on the doorbell, prepared to offer that amount. In scenario A, the door is opened by a vicar.fn4 In scenario B, the door is opened by a man naked except for a pair of underpants. The car has not changed, but what has changed is its provenance. The vicar is likely to be a man with a great deal invested in his reputation for probity, while the second man is clearly immune to any sense of shame. Would you seriously say that the amount you are prepared to pay would not increase in the first instance and decrease in the second?”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

“To put it crudely, when you multiply bullshit with bullshit, you don’t get a bit more bullshit – you get bullshit squared.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“There are two key steps that a mathematician uses. He uses intuition to guess the right problem and the right solution and then logic to prove it.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“Logic should be a tool, not a rule.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“The late David Ogilvy, one of the greats of the American advertising industry and the founder of the company I work for, apparently once said, ‘The trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say.’*”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“It is a never-mentioned, slightly embarrassing but nevertheless essential facet of free market capitalism that it does not care about reasons – in fact it will often reward lucky idiots. You can be a certifiable lunatic with an IQ of 80, but if you stumble blindly on an underserved market niche at the right moment, you will be handsomely rewarded.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“As Shakespeare wrote, ‘there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so’.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“wise storyteller called Aesop. It appears in several of his fables including, most famously, the story of the fox and the grapes. A fox gazes longingly at a beautiful bunch of grapes hanging from the high branch of a tree, his mouth watering. He jumps to reach them, but misses by a long way. He tries again and again, but each time it is in vain. Sitting down, he looks at the grapes in disgust. ‘What a fool I am,’ he says, ‘wearing myself out to get a bunch of sour grapes* that are not worth the effort.’ The moral of the fable is that many pretend to despise and belittle that which is beyond their reach. This seems fair enough, though it is worth asking how our lives would feel if we did not play this mental trick on ourselves – we might go about in a constant state of resentment because we were not the billionaire recipient of a Nobel Prize.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“One characteristic of humans is that we naturally direct our attention to the upside of any situation if an alternative narrative is available, minimising the downside.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“because the furniture chain’s eccentric billionaire founder Ingvar Kamprad was convinced that the effort invested in buying and assembling his company’s furniture added to its perceived value. When working with IKEA I was once advised: ‘Do not, under any circumstances, suggest ways of making the IKEA experience more convenient. If you do, we shall fire you on the spot.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“All too often, what matters is not whether an idea is true or effective, but whether it fits with the preconceptions of a dominant cabal.*”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“Just as there are words that are best left unspoken, so there are feelings that are best left unthought.*”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life