Grand unifying theory

• Commercial imperative: to have clients coming back. Above all else.
• Indications of commitment:

• expense of communication: the thick card, embossed envelope - Rory Sutherland
• intellectual, social commitment to clients - Robert Cialdini

• Standardisation, commoditisation:

• guarantees margins tend to zero (you have solved the risk and therefore depleted the premium)
• Of course because of non-linear effects, you hjavent solved the risk; it is just that the market prices itself as if it has, because everyone labouring under the same common delusion of modernism that “we have comprehensively syndicated risk/banished boom and bust/reached the sunlit uplands”
• Indicates absence of commitment
• Allows a lack of client commitment: products and offerings are fungible
• The risk/reward of greater effort to attract customers isn’t there. Hence the headlong rush to lean production
• Targets your offering at the mean - the commitment is to be found at the Edges - Rory Sutherland

• The besoke, thje tail events, the risk scenarios, off-piste; here be dragons:

• This is where the best opportunities are. This is where innovation will come from. This is where developments will emerge. Here the stakes are higher.
• You can’t manage it by algorithm. You need experience; you need diversity; you need expertise. You need people comfortable with doubt and without certainty. Standard tropes and management bullshit will get found out.
• Here redundancy is an advantage and an imperative, not a competitive disadvantage.