The Wiki Man: Rory Sutherland

London, 2011

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and Rory. On these occasions it is always the job of the most junior person in the room to serve the tea. As nothing happened, the account lead prompted Rory. Tea Rory! he said, nodding towards the tray. Rory replied, Thanks, Id love one. Rorys career in account management was short-lived.

Introduction
by Paul ODonnell

Luckily for Rory, Ogilvy had just launched a new discipline called Planning and it was felt that perhaps he would be better suited to this more cerebral function. Our big mistake was to allow Rory to operate a new-fangled piece of technology that we had installed. (He was actually the only person who understood how to use it, so we had little or

David Ogilvy once urged people to cultivate their eccentricities early in life. He would have been proud of Rory! Rory joined Ogilvy & Mather Direct in 1988 as part of our first crop of graduate trainees. He was perhaps a touch more youthful and, to be fair, a little slimmer, but other than that he would be instantly recognisable as the Rory Sutherland of today. It seems he was born in his mid-forties. Even in the hottest summers he wore a thick tweed jacket and purple shorts, all of which he had almost certainly slept in. He smoked a pipe and cigarettes and, usually, both at the same time. But it wasnt his eclectic fashion sense that made you first aware of Rory; he had a pompous, booming, stentorian voice that made you want to slap him. That is, until you actually met him, when of course, you became captivated. Ogilvy was looking for trainee account people and I can honestly say that in all my time in the business he was without doubt the worst graduate trainee we ever hired. For example, in one of Rorys first client meetings, the tea was placed on a tray in front of the senior agency person, the client,

no choice) The machine was an early on-line information system called MAID. Somehow, you asked it questions and the answers then came spewing out on a continuous-feed of computer paper. Im sure Rory did do some planning during this period, but his major contribution to the department seemed to be to sit behind an ever increasing mountain of computer print-outs, typing in random questions, reading sheet after sheet, puffing on his pipe or cigarette or, as I said, sometimes both, muttering fascinating, fascinating. Im afraid his planning career also came to an abrupt end and he was fired. This led to a near revolution across the agency, and it was decided to give Rory one last chancein the creative department. He never looked back, and within 5 years he was the Executive Creative Director. At last, hed found his mtier. The rest is pretty much history. A highly awarded creative career evolved into a very unusual creative role, as a technology visionary, an iconoclast, an industry spokesman, a leading behavioral economist, and on many occasions a stand-up comedian!

4 We felt that this was an appropriate moment to bring together The best of Rory so far. In particular, to celebrate the remarkably successful completion of his Presidency of his beloved IPA. And, as the title of the book suggests, this isnt the sum total of Rorys career, its the story so far.

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with his smoking habit. So with electric cigarette in hand and a new set of tweeds from eBay, he still plays a significant part in the management of Ogilvy. This foreword, of course, is just a taster of the real Rory. And thats exactly what you will find in this teaser booklet, an entre not the main course. So please enjoy the starter. The full menu dgustation in book form will be published in November. The perfect gift for Christmas! Paul

I was a strange man in a tie getting onto a train-load of kids going to Disneyland

His age has at last caught up with his dress sense, and technology

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Rory: You may want to shut, just bang the door shut just in case theres noise outside. This is a marvellous podcast recording device is it? Interviewer: Yeah, this is something that weve been using for our events and things like that. Tremendous.

Christina: Its amazing

Yeah, its a great bit of kit. Its my first time using it; it seems to be picking up the levels alright.

Thats for you by the way, the water

Oh fantastic thanks, Ill need that in a second. Ive got a series of questions here. This is my first time interviewing, so youll have to go easy on me Fire away. We wanted to know a bit about your time before Ogilvy. We were wondering if there was an event or experience that you think has played a huge part in where you are today, and your understanding of Aaah, I suppose going back, I mean before even, you know, education involvement and so forth, aah I suppose my father was a self employed businessman he both was a small scale property developer and also ran a few small businesses on the side. So there was a kind of entrepreneurial spirit in the household.

@rorysutherland

@rorysutherland
@rorysutherland

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Which is a useful thing to have in truth, you know, because it just gives you an instinctive understanding of business, how it works, in a way that having a dad whos salaried doesnt quite, you know. So I think that was undoubtedly useful. You dont realise it at the time but that was useful. It also meant both my parents worked from home. I have inherited a few other things my father, in particular, is an incredibly late riser and so by temperament I get up at about 10:00 and go to bed at about 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning. I mean, this morning I had to get up about 7:30 to go to this meeting at 9:00, but unless I have something thats unavoidably at 9 oclock, Ill do pretty much, as does Paul I think?

But certain habits like that. I have also grown up with an interest in business and how it works selling things, you know, how things are sold was kind of an innate area of discussion in the household. The whole family going back, whether theyd be a mixture of Welsh. Scottish or English, farmers, doctors, school teachers, pretty much all of them tended to be in some sense self-employed. I think I was the first person in my family actually to work for somebody else. Right As far as we can work out. How did they view that? Did they see that as a break in tradition?

mmmmm mmmm
Doesnt he? Ill do pretty much the same thing. You know, I think the working day should start about 10:00/10:30 and it can go on until 8:00 or 9:00 thats fine, I have no problem with that, I just dont like mornings. ha ha ha So, interesting, you know, in a weird kind of way. Whether its genetic or not, I dont know. You probably just pick up habits like this. I find it weird that if you ever drive home late from London through the suburbs, youll see places like Bromley where there isnt a light on after 10:30. You wonder what on earth they all do! You know: well weve watched the news, better go to bed now. I suppose Bromley is probably all weird wife-swapping and deviant sex actually; yes, most probably. No, no they didnt mind that actually. I mean, umm, aaah, I suppose thats actually an interesting question I dont think they thought: oh Lord hes gone and sold out or anything like that. I dont think it was as extreme as that.

an awful lot of maths is a total waste of time, when on earth in life do you need to know the surface area of a cone?

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31.05.2008

Linda works miracles in the kitchen while Trevor is ubiquitous with the cup that cheers.

The Good Food Guide, probably by Craig Brown. I still quote it gnomically when asked whether

a result of 1975 or 6 or whenever it was, whenever effectively grammar schools were forced to go independent for most parts. Interestingly, one influence was doing both both of which were useful A Levels: classics and maths. Which is a bloody schizophrenic choice but actually looking back, are the two things I would say that everybody ought to be taught. I think everybody ought to learn a language not necessarily Latin or Greek, but a language like German which has case endings, which teaches you the rudiments of grammar because the benefit of that is you can then sit down and write an English sentence and know whether or not its okay. You know, there isnt that weird fear that you get of: is this sentence actually okay or not, because if youve done Latin or German or one of those, or Russian for that matter, you just have a better understanding of how language works. And I think that is useful for anybody who wants to write quite a lot. The second thing would be maths, an awful lot of maths is a total waste of time, when on earth in life do you need to know the surface area of a cone? But the stuff involving statistics and probability, I would argue that should be taught as a mandatory at school. People instinctively are bad at it, you statistical significance, all that kind of stuff. know, theyre bad at working out probabilities, likelihood,

These reviews were usually written by the kind of people who preferred to purchase from an

My education was local Grammar school gone independent as

Back then, professional writers had little to fear from amateurs. Not only because space in print

navigation to my lady wife, I chose to peruse the atlas myself, necessitating the removal of my

emporium than to buy from a shop. The word peruse was always a clue. Reluctant to entrust

driving gloves. Later, ensconced in a nearby hostelry, the writer would relax by partaking of

This sentence has haunted me for 15 years. Its from a parody of the typical readers review in

some restaurant or other is any good.

ales in the company of mine host.

The Wiki Man www.spectator.co.uk

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was necessarily limited, but also because non-professional writing was often dire. No longer. Never mind what you hear about declining standards; digital media has been wonderful for the written word. Towards the end of the last century, many people wrote infrequently; when they did, their writing took on a kind of awkward ceremony prose which no more reflected everyday speech than an Ascot hat resembles everyday dress. Now, thanks to email, blogs and other social media, real people write more often and so more naturally. (Youll see this at www.b3ta.com/questions; misspelled, ill-punctuated, regularly obscene but always readable.) Unlike the purists, Im less worried by English becoming too casual than by the opposite problem when it evolves within closed groups. You find this in business, academia and politics, where people unthinkingly adopt the style and vocabulary of their tribe. Blairites were as bad as Marxists at this, loving meaningless words such as outreach or inclusion. But its not just Lefties: any group which could use a euphemism such as sub-prime without accompanying curly-quote finger actions was asking for trouble too. Its why, to avoid lapsing into the sharedlanguage and shared-thinking of bankers, Warren Buffett writes Berkshire Hathaway annual reports as though addressing his sister Bertie.

Online, thank God, the very mathematics of the worldwide web act powerfully against groupspeak or argot. The nature of hypertext and the mechanics of search engines automatically give preference to the popularist above the specialist and favour the clear and concise over the tortuous. By an almost Darwinian process, good writing is referenced and thus magnified while bad writing sinks from sight. Write for the many and you will be seen by many; write for the few and few will read you. This is why the blogosphere, along with sites such as Wikipedia, has suddenly created a new outlet for writers who can explain complex ideas in simple terms. Its why economics blogs (www.marginalrevolution.com and Robert Reich are good here) are read by hundreds of thousands. And why, when seriously ill with a man-cold last week, I happily spent my convalescence reading amateur explanations of Bayes Theorem and pricing theory (snipurl.com/spectator8 is as good an introduction to pricing as youll find anywhere). Like pornstars, journalists and other professional writers will soon find the output of talented amateurs posing a growing threat to their livelihoods. Trust me, I have no plans to give up the day job.

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You know, you can bamboozle people with fairly shambolic statistics, very, very easily. I think its very dangerous thing to the extent that you have a population which is often terrified of completely the wrong thing.

Okay? hmm hmm And hell say, right, now, you know its not Door C, do you want

Would you see that as a lack of knowledge about maths or a lack of critical thinking perhaps? Okay No, I think you do need the maths and actually I can prove that. Even very good mathematicians get some statistical questions wrong. So if you take the famous Monty Hall problem Yeah Im not aware of Have you ever heard of this?
Monte Halperin, (born August 25, 1921), better known by the stage name Monty Hall, is a Canadian-born MC, producer, actor, singer and sportscaster, best known as host of the television game show Lets Make a Deal.
Source: Wikipedia, August 2011

to change your mind?

Paul Erds (26 March 1913 20 September 1996) was a Hungarian mathematician. Erds published more papers than any other mathematician in history,working with hundreds of collaborators. He worked on problems in combinatorics, graph theory, number theory, classical analysis, approximation theory, set theory, and probability theory. He is also known for his legendarily eccentric personality.
Source: Wikipedia, August 2011

Okay?

And the question is, should the contestant change their mind and choose Door B or should they stick with Door A? Actually, your chance of winning, I think, is either twice or 50% greater for Gods sake, Ill do the maths later your chance of winning is significantly greater if you switch.

No

Its a very interesting question. You have a game show and there are three doors. You choose a door and behind one of the doors is a Cadillac and behind the other two doors is a goat. I have no idea why its a goat or Cadillac, it just happened to be shown this way. Right Right But the idea is that you want to win a Cadillac, you dont want to win a goat. Now every time a contestant chooses, the game show host, a chap called Monty Hall who was a famous game show host in the US, will then go, I see youve chosen Door A and then hell throw open lets say Door C, to reveal a goat. Right So actually you need to do the maths to absolutely understand this kind of thing. Now what I think is operating here, and this is where behavioural economics comes in, is that we are naturally suspicious of someone trying to help us because if we think about it, we think: this Monty Hall guy, he really wants us to win a goat not a Cadillac, so why on earth would he do something to our benefit? And so by throwing open the But even some of the best mathematicians in the world, including a guy called Erds, refused to believe that you should switch, they believed you should stick. Really?

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extra door we think: hes just trying to mislead us, I ought to stick with my original choice. But actually by revealing one of the goats, your chance of winning if you switch is significantly higher. The thought experiment that shows this is to imagine there were 100 doors, 99 goats and one Cadillac; imagine that Monty Hall, the game show host, then reveals 98 goats and says: Do you want to switch and choose door 97 or do you want to stick with your original choice of door number 1? Youd probably switch if you see what I mean. Yeah, yeah Wow!

AIDS, from his positive test showing? And the actual answer is 1 in 10.

If you have 100 people, 99 of them wont have AIDS but 9 of those people will throw up a false positive. Youll have one person who has AIDS where the tests will 99% of the time reveal correctly that he does but actually the 10 people who get a positive test, only one of them actually has AIDS.

Even really intelligent doctors, who can often think quite critically, totally, totally fuck it up
Now there was a guy, Mlodinow, who in the book called The Okay. Youd go: Hold on, whats so significant about door 97, why hasnt he opened that? But when its only three doors, were basically befuddled. Even really intelligent doctors, who can often think quite critically, totally, totally fuck it up. If you have, for example, an AIDS test which has a 99% accuracy rate but a 9% rate of false positives, and the incidence of AIDS in the population is 1% and someone comes in and has a random test without any reasons to believe that he may have AIDS you know, hes not an intravenous drug user or similar if the test comes up positive, given that the test is 99% reliable, a 9% rate of false positives and a 1% incidence of AIDS in the general population, what are the odds that that chap has

Leonard Mlodinow is a physicist and author from Chicago, Illinois

Drunkards Walk, which is about general mathematics and understanding, he himself experienced this because he had a positive AIDS test and the doctor said to himan intelligent doctor, not an idiotsaid to him: Well basically your chances of having AIDS is 99%, and the mathematician, fortunately, was familiar with Bayes theorem. He went away and thought: I think this guy is talking shit and discovered actually that the odds in his case were very heavily weighted to the fact that he did not have AIDS. This is vitally important because in juries you get cases where DNA evidence is completely misunderstood. If you randomly test

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the town against a DNA sample, say you randomly test 30,000 people, some will bring up a positive, but theres no other particular reason to believe that person is guilty. Nothing
Bayes theorem links a conditional probability to its inverse. Its simple form is: P (A B) = P (B A) P (A) P(B)

do is to factor the chance that someones experienced a double cot death against the odds of someone being a double child murderer. That is also very, very rare. The Royal Statistical Society absolutely sanctioned this guy for giving his evidence and tried to get the woman released. She ended up spending six years in jail, was basically wrecked and died as an alcoholic about two years later Oh my God.
Addressing the jury, he [Roy Meadow] testified that the odds against two cot deaths in the same family were 73 million to 1. He calculated the figure by squaring the 8,5001 odds of cot death in a normal family. It was as likely, he said, as an 801 horse winning four consecutive Grand Nationals. This sensational and insensitive analogy was to become a suicide note for his career.
Source: Times Online, February 17, 2006

other than their positive DNA test provides a likelihood that they committed the crime. Maybe this makes it a third more likely rather than not at all, but it is not beyond reasonable doubt. If you want a really sad case, the Sally Clark case of double infant cot death.

Where P (A B) denotes the conditional probability of A given B

Source: Wikipedia, August 2011

Go on of alcohol poisoning, or virtual suicide. Thats the case where This is a case where a guy called Roy Meadow, a patently intelligent, educated guy, said the chances of having one cot death is 1 in 100,000, so the chances of this woman having two is multiply them both together. So therefore the chance that she is not a double child murderer is 1 in 100m or whatever the [calculates the problem] utterly shit statistics by very intelligent people really, really fuck things up. I mean I found it very interesting in the case of Madeleine McCann that patently, the chance of abduction is very unlikely and rare but also the chance of either deliberate or accidental child killing followed by a cover up is also pretty rare. What strikes me as weird is that no one has investigated the third possibilities, e.g. she got confused, wandered out into the street, was run over by a pissed guy who thought: Im pissed and Ive run over a child and, you know, half way to hospital realises the child is dead and goes: I cant face 1 in a billion or 1 in 100m? Anyway, it might be even more than that actually. That is absolute bullshit. First of all, because it assumes there is no genetic connection, secondly it seems theres no environmental connection, for example something leaking in the house. Both of those things are a false assumption, but even if you factor those out then actually he has done bad maths, because what you have to
Sally Clark was sent to prison two years ago, condemned to life inside for murdering her two babies because among other evidence there was only one chance in 73 million of the babies, born a year apart, both dying of natural causes.
Source: The Observer, Sunday 15 July 2001

I believe you

myself, Ill bury the child in the woods somewhere. The fact that that is never considered a statistical possibility when actually, lets face it, more pissed people drove past that flat that night than paedophiles did, or abductive paedophiles. That strikes me as very weird that we have this completely bifurcated view of probabilities.
Portuguese police are investigating the disappearance of Madeleine McCann who went missing last night in the seaside village of Praia da Luz in southwest Portugal
Source: The Sun, May 4, 2007

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CSI season 2, episode 2: Chaos Theory. First aired October 4, 2001.

So the wild card option can sometimes be much more probable?

Whats odd is I never heard the wild card option even debated. Did anybody see a brilliant episode of CSI where it turned out that a woman, whilst she was retrieving her bin from the dumpster outside her flat, a car bumped into the dumpster

and pulled her

and pulled her in! And it was a brilliant case because it was actually an apparent crime where no crime was actually committed. They worked out it was actually just the combination of unfortunate circumstances. It was one of the most brilliant crime programmesit was the best ever CSI episode, I think.

I think it was a true story, I think it did happen.

Really? What had happened isthere was a bit of tripeshe was leaving because she was being slightly bullied or she had an affair with her Professor. While emptying her bin, she dropped the bin accidentally down the rubbish chute which meant she wouldnt get the deposit back on her room. She goes down in the dark to retrieve the thing from the dumpster and while leaning against the dumpster a car hits it and effectively bangs her into it. She then falls into the dumpster and thats it. But it was the most brilliant, brilliant thing because to be honest, it was actually what in police investigation of suspicious death probably happens more often than anything else, which is you actually find theres some innocent explanation for it. To make the point, I think statistics and probability should be taught extensively.

@rorysutherland

The Wiki Man www.spectator.co.uk

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13.12.2008

its not always a good idea to read certain books when youre too young.
At school it didnt occur to any of us that Brave New World was meant to be a bad place it seemed like a utopian fantasy world to me. Advice to writers: if you want to alarm teenagers with the nightmarish prospect of a dystopian future, its a good idea not to fill it with really cool drugs and high-tech pornography. More mature people, however, do worry about new technology, especially its effects on sex and morality. A tabloid scare a few years ago caused much hand-wringing about Internet Child Adoption; all that had happened was that a childless couple had used the internet to find the telephone number of an adoption agency overseas, but the addition of the word Internet made the event instantly more shocking, as though someone had started a kind of eBay for orphans. Every invention brings a backlash of warnings that it will erode the social restraints

and inhibitions vital to civilised society. There is a Jacobean tract in which the writer preaches against the prospect of human flight for fear that, once men and women could move freely through the air, the roofs of churches would be covered with amorous couples. In 1897 a crowd of Cambridge undergraduates hanged an effigy of a woman opposite the Senate House to protest against the admission of women and expressed their horror of liberated women by sitting the effigy on a bicycle (bit.ly/nuWc4F). But are we worrying about the wrong things here? While we all agonise about moral issues, the most dangerous technology of recent years has spread without a voice raised against it. I am talking about the spreadsheet. What the spreadsheet has done is create in organisations and governments an over-reliance on numbers (by no means always meaningful or even accurate) with the result that often spurious numerical targets, metrics or values invariably override any conflicting human judgment. This has given rise to what a colleague of mine, Anthony Tasgal, calls The Arithmocracy: a powerful left-brained administrative caste which attaches importance only to things which can be expressed in numerical terms or on a chart.

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Dont misunderstand me. I am not making a trite price of everything but value of nothing point, nor am I attacking genuine science. I object to the spreadsheet precisely because of the pseudo-science involved, and the way numbers create a semblance of mathematical rigour which lends some measures or extrapolations an influence they dont deserve. Einstein posted a sign in his office at Princeton which read, Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts. In spreadsheet-land everyone knows educational standards are falling but thats fine because the pass rate is going up. Bankers have instinctively known for years that something was wrong but 1,000 screens twinkling with reassuring numbers have vetoed anyone from acting on their instincts. We worry endlessly about how technology might give rein to our baser urges but give no thought at all to the dangers of excessive logic. Yet the Holocaust and the Soviet famine were both the product of meticulous government officials in dutiful pursuit of numerical targets. Italians, by and large, dont go in for atrocities. Its not mass hysteria that really frightens me, its mass rationality.

This is a 24 page teaser for Rory Sutherlands main book, which will be launched November 2011 Keep your eyes peeled at www.ogilvy.co.uk Or follow on twitter: @rorysutherland @ogilvylondon @THE_OGILVY_LABS Designed and published by Its Nice That and Ogilvy Digital Labs, Ogilvy. Photography Inside cover: Julian Hanford Pages 5, 10 & centrefold: Jake Green Illustration Pages 3 & 4: Stevie Gee Pages 5, 7, 810, 1420: Gordon Armstrong Research Rupert de Paula Liv Siddall