Rory Sutherland

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Vice chairman of Ogilvy, originator of its behavioural psychology unit, author of Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas that Don’t Make Sense and TED talker extraordinaire. Good chap. Would pet. 12/10.

Business, and government, suffers from a kind of physics envy. It wants the world to be the kind of place where the input and the change are proportionate: everything is numerically expressible and the amount you spend on something is proportionate to the scale of your success.

—Rory Sutherland

Rolls Royce and Maserati stopped selling their cars at car shows, because they look really expensive when they’re at a car show. They started selling them at yacht and aircraft shows, because If you’ve been looking at Lear jets all morning, a £300,000 car is an impulse buy.

— Rory Sutherland

The question was given to a bunch of engineers: how do we make the journey to Paris better? They came up with a very good solution: spend £6 billion building completely new tracks from London to the coast, knocking 40 minutes off a 3½ hour journey. But it strikes me as an unimaginative way of improving a train journey merely to make it shorter. What you should in fact do is employ all the world’s top male and female supermodels, pay them to walk the length of the train handing out free Château Petrus for the duration of the journey. You’ll still have about £3 billion pounds left and people will ask for the trains to be slowed down.

—Rory Sutherland