The premise of this book by an ad man is that sometimes you have to use non-obvious or seemingly irrational ways to sell things to people because we don't all behave with strict rationality. ('Ideas' in the title refers almost exclusively to making and selling products, and occasionally to selling behaviour changes.) This is potentially very interesting and does have some very good insights about framing choices and changing minds, if you sift through the chaff.

In the Introduction, Sutherland claims the "alchemy of the book's title is the science of knowing what economists are wrong about." I don't quite agree with that...oh, he does cite science here and there, but I think his thesis is more empirical in nature. He sees T as the irrational entity he is, and cites his irrational approach to trade as being more effective than a logical Hillary because "[i]rrational people are much more powerful than rational people because their threats are so much more convincing." Probably true...but no reason to ever put an irrational person in charge of anything. In my opinion. Sutherland says Being slightly bonkers can be a good negotiating strategy: being rational means you are predictable, and being predictable makes you weak. Hillary thinks like an economists, while Donald is a game theorist, and is able to achieve with one tweet what would take Clinton four years of congressional infighting. That's alchemy; you may hate it, but it works. So Alchemy is chaotic lunacy. And I don't know that "it works"...despite the rest of the book. On the surface, and the whole, so many of the successes illustrated seem like accidents. (That quote was painful to type. T as a "theorist"?! And no rational adult can ever not feel immature using that term to twit something - guess that pegs me, right? But you might be wrong...) This article is based on the book “Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don’t Make Sense” by Rory Sutherland. This book changed my way of thinking, and I would like to share 11 rules with you, which can help you make better decisions and life choices. (Note: This post is made as a summary and should not be used verbatim in any other context. If you want to use the ideas, please buy the original book) Problem solving is a strangely status conscious job: there are high-status approaches and low-status approaches (think consulting/coding vs design). Major markets have banned/rejected vaping/e-cigarettes although its better replacement. Its difficult to get a man understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. – Despite approaching Microsoft with the idea of a system whereby people could share Office documents over the nascent internet and being roundly rejected, Rory went on to help found OgilvyOne, the group’s dedicated digital and direct agency. He remains an advocate of so-called ‘360 Degree Branding’ ensuring brands have a coherent, joined-up presence in all relevant media areas. Rory was appointed Head of Copy, and shortly afterwards Creative Director of Ogilvy. He has also served as the president of the Institute of Practioners in Advertising (IPA) - the first ‘creative’ to do so. Ogilvy is now part of the massive WPP ad and media group and count Ford, Unilever, IBM, American Express, BP, and British Airways amongst their top accounts.

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Let’s start with where the author’s point of view comes from... this guy seems to be big fan of Nassim N Taleb and Daniel Kahneman. Well... this gives me an excuse to begin my review with a Quote from “Skin in the Game” by Nassim Taleb.. A person doing recruitment may think they want to hire the best person for the job, but subconsciously they want to avoid hiring someone who is bad. Low variance will be as appealing as high average performance. Hiring a group of people makes for less conventional candidates. The best thinkers are those able to cross disciplines, deploying theories from one area into others. One man who does this exceptionally well is Rory Sutherland. As Vice Chairman of Ogilvy in the UK he is an ad-man. But he is also a student of behavioural economics, evolutionary psychology and complexity economics, which he prospects for ideas to help him understand consumer behaviour. In nature it is often necessary for something that can't be faked. Information is free, sincerity is not.

Psychophysics is the study of the neurobiology of perception and how what we see, hear, taste and feel differs from ‘objective’ reality. It explains how TV screens are able to show us a full range of colours even though they are only capable of producing blue, green and red photons. It explains why we think the Parthenon has straight columns when closer inspection will reveal that it doesn’t. Rory Sutherland is the Vice-Chairman at media and ad company Ogilvy UK. Combining creative thinking with a passion for behavioural science he examines why people think, buy, vote or act the way they do, what influences them, and why they're so frequently irrational in their choices. Widely considered one of the leading real-world practictioners of behavioural science, he looks at what can be learned about the responses and reactions of employees, customers and the public and how that can guide the future of business and society. First, I requested a review because the subtitle presented ("The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life") caught my attention and I'd hoped to glean some tidbits for my wife's business. It was a curiosity that another subtitle...and a different title were associated with the ISBN! Another subtitle: "The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense." The other title: "The Thing Which Has No Name". Huh. I knew that this was previously published in some form in the UK, but normally I can find a match for what was on the available list. (I did find a TEDTalk of a similar name to the "The Thing" version.) Sutherland is in advertising, hence the subtitle of my edition. To me personally three themes particularly stood out. First, the Girardian nature of the book - Sutherland's thoughts on when to avoid what amounts to mimetic rivalry and when to harness it constitute a rare practical application of Girardian theory. Second, there is a fair amount of overlap between Taleb and Sutherland, but in comparison to the former, Sutherland's explanations and illustrations of concepts like scientism, ergodicity and bounded rationality are noticeably clearer, and certainly less petulant.What this book doesn't have is a linear flow or process to follow, but then again it'd be strange if there unquestionable logic or a precise recipe for alchemy. After a spell teaching at a grammar school (and finding his colleagues far more challenging than the pupils), Rory applied to a number of advertising and marketing agencies and was offered a planning role by Ogilvy & Mather. He was asked to leave the Planning Department and moved to the Creative Department instead as a junior copywriter. He worked on accounts including American Express, Royal Mail, and the relatively obscure software company Microsoft. The word "Alchemy" in the book title is more of a metaphor of saying "magic", like how the alchemists in the old days intended to turn low cheap metal (lead) into great metal (gold). Although the alchemists failed to do so in chemistry, the author believes we can still make alchemy happens in other areas (eg: business, policy making, human interactions etc) by using very cheap techniques but making great products/services. In Part 2: An Alchemist's Tale (or Why Magic Really Still Exists), Sutherland shares one question on a test an ad agency used for prospective copywriters: Here are two identical 25 cent coins. Sell me the one on the right. One candidate answered he would take the coin, dip it in Marilyn Monroe's bag and then say, "I'll sell you a genuine 25-cent coin as owned by Marilyn Monroe." (I'm quoting. Perhaps "quarter" is an unfamiliar term?) The lesson? "We don't value things; we value their meaning." I remember my older sons wanting a Pokemon Charizard card in the early 1990s. It was "rare". Despite there being hundreds of thousands printed, there was a perception of rarity because so many more of the other cards were out there in the market. For them, there was value applied.

Good quote from Cedric Villani, mathematician and winner of a Fields Medal: "There are key two steps a mathematician uses. He uses intuition to guess the right problem and the right solution and then logic to prove it." Heuristics are results of million years of evolution/survival, avoid rejecting them outright. Even mathematicians use intuition to guess the right problem, solution and then logic to prove it.More from the Introduction - and why I was wondering if I'd ever get out of it - Sutherland has a subsection of a subsection where he warns "Be careful before calling something nonsense." Ordinarily, ,that might be good advice, but he explains with an example of a "1996 survey on the place of religion in public life in America [he's British]" by the Heritage Institute that found 1. Churchgoers are more likely to be married, less likely to be divorced or single and more likely to manifest high levels of satisfaction in their marriage. Economic theory is an insufficient way to identify value proposition - both in B2B and B2C scenarios. Loss avoidance and personal status gains are a much stronger motivators than prospects for economic gains If you want a simple life, unladen by weird decisions, do not marry anyone who has worked in the creative department of an advertising agency. For good and ill, the job instills a paranoid fear of the obvious and fosters the urge to question every orthodoxy and to rail against every consensus.

Find one or two things your boss is rubbish at and be quite good at them". Complementary talent is far more valuable than conformist talent.Big data carries with it the promise of certainty, but in truth it usually provides a huge amount of information about a narrow field of knowledge. Talented managers lead successful brands… The company is its own product, owned and managed by the right person with the right culture.” Signalling is the idea that humans attach significance to a communication proportional to the cost of generating or transmitting it. An expensive or well-designed wedding invitation will command more attention than an e-card. The sunk cost of expensive advertising signals a brand’s permanence. Rory Sutherland asks why patients in an accident and emergency ward prefer to go into a new waiting room after seeing the triage nurse rather than return to the waiting room they initially entered. He concludes that they like the feeling of moving along a process and that hospitals would do well to note that patients ‘care about how they are treated just as much as they care about how they are treated’. It was both insightful and humorous. “The advertisements which bees find useful are flowers – and if you think about it, a flower is simply a weed with an advertising budget.” And the forthright honesty of a Porsche ad was a bit crude but quite attention getting, before, as the author noted, “...I imagine the Porsche dealership stripped it of its franchise.”