Book Review: Alchemy
Alchemy: The dark art and curious science of creating magic in brands, business, and life by Rory Sutherland
At first, I was skeptical of this anti-rationality, magic of marketing book with lots of stories and chaotic footnotes on every page, but by the end I highly recommend it. The premise is simple: ‘Alongside valuable products of science and logic, there are also hundreds of seemingly irrational solutions to human problems waiting to be discovered, only if we abandon logic in the search for answers. So when you demand logic, there is a price.’
It took.a while for me to truly understood what he meant but when I did the book was truly absorbing, original, and insightful. Here is an example. See below for more. +”psychological moonshots’ are comparatively easy. Making a train journey 20% faster might cost hundreds of million but making it 20% more enjoyable may cost almost nothing. It seems likely that the biggest progress in the next 50 years may come not from improvements in technology but in psychology and design thinking. The uber map is a psychological moonshot, because it does not reduce the waiting time for a taxi but simply making waiting g90% less frustrating.
+’in real life, most things aren’t logical, they are psycho - logical. When we do put a name to non-rational behavior, it is usually a word like ‘emotion’ which makes it sounds like logic’s evil twin. “You’re being emotional’ is used as code for ‘you’re being an idiot’.Humans are a deeply social spieces so in the real world, social context is absolutely critical’ If you went into most boardrooms and announced that you had rejected a merger on ‘emotional grounds’. You’d be likely to be shown the door.
+this book is an attack on a dangerous kind of logical overreach, which demands that every solution should have a convincing rationale before it can even be considered or attempted..To think unlike an economist.
+Being slightly bonkers can be a good negotiating strategy: being rational means you are predictable, and being credible makes you weak. Hillary thinks like an economist, 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.
+It is easy to depict a discovery, once made, as resulting from a logical, linear process but that does not mean that science should progress according to near, linear and sequential rules.
The record of science in some ways casts doubt on a scientific approach to problem solving.
+ You can never be fired fro being logical. If your reasoning is found and unimaginative, even if you fail, it is unlikely you attract much blame. It is much easier to be fired for being illogical than it is for being unimaginative
-creative destruction and why companies atrophy.
The problem 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 - ogilvy
“Asking the real why” people may be accurate commentators on their emotional state, but the causes of that emotional state are often a complete mystery to them.
+”psychological moonshots’ are comparatively easy. Making a train journey 20% faster might costs hundreds of million but making it 20% more enjoyable may cost almost nothing. It seems likely that the biggest progress in the next 50 years may come not from improvements in technology but in psychology and design thinking. The uber map is a psychological moonshot, because it does not reduce the waiting time for a taxi but simply making waiting g90% less frustrating.
“Reasoning is a priceless tool for evaluating solutions, and essential if you wish to defend them, but it does not always o a very good job of finding those solutions in the first place.
+’ in math 1 * 10 and 10 * 1 are always the same but in real life, it rarely is. You can trick 10 people 1 time but it’s much harder to trick 1 person 10 times.
Today the principal activity of any publicly held company is rarely the creation of products to satisfy a market need. Management attention is instead largely directed towards the infestation of plausible-sounding efficiency narratives to satisfy financial analyst, many of whom know nothing about the businesses they claim to analyze, beyond what they can read on a spreadsheet.
+the ‘door close’ Botton on elevations is many times a placebo button - it is connected to nothing at all. It is there simply to make impatient people feel better by giving them something to do and the illusion of control.
+Effective communication will always require some degree of irrationality in its creation because if it’s perfectly rational it becomes, like water, entirely lacking in flavor. This explains why working with an advertising agency can be frustrating: it is difficult to product good advertising, but good advertising is only good beaus it is difficult to product.
Rory’s Rules of Alchemy
1.) The opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea
2.) Don’t design for average
3.) It doesn’t pay to be logical if everyone else is being logical
4.) The nature of our attention affects the nature of our experience
5.) A flower is simply a weed with an advertising budget
6.) The problem with logic is that it kills off magic
7.) A good guess which stands up to observation is still science. So is a lucky accident
8.) Test counterintuitive things only because no one else will
9.) Solving problems using rationality is like playing golf with only one club
10.) Dare to be trivial
11.) If there were a logical answer, we would have found it