The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 109 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Management consulting gainshare agreements are a scam
“A game share agreement is a management consulting scam where you claim a certain percentage of the cost savings you identify in year one.”
Sutherland: Shareholder Value Focus Prevents Effective Innovation and Customer Investment
“The shareholder value movement's totally incoherent because over what time frame which shareholder... What are you optimizing for? It's a completely incoherent nonsense, which is very, very friendly to stock market analysts who want a ready supply of quarterly…”
Sutherland: Economics is creatively limiting by reducing motivation to bribes and fines
“The problem of economics isn't only that it's wrong, it's that it's incredibly creatively limiting, because it tends to posit a very one-dimensional view of human motivation, and therefore, if you wish to change human behavior, the only two ways you can do it …”
Sutherland: Shareholder value short-termism creates psychopathic, untrusted businesses
“And I think the problem with the shareholder value movement, by the way, and short term targets in business, is you're creating in businesses with a focus on the short term, you're creating psychopathic businesses, you're creating businesses which consumers in…”
Sutherland: AI must present options because humans require comparison to choose
“At the very least, you'll have to show them three or four or five skiing holidays from which they choose. Because we can't really choose in the absence of comparison.”
Companies should shift 20% of marketing budgets to top-tier call centers
“Probably 50% of the time I would advise to a client,
Take 10 to 20% of your marketing budget and spend it on upgrading the call center.
Pay the people too much.
Get the best practitioners.
I think it's perfectly legitimate in some organizations there should be…”
Publicly traded companies are incentivized to behave like psychopaths
“PLCs, or companies on the NASDAQ, or the, you know, stock exchange, are incentivized to behave like psychopaths, because they're optimized around short-term transactional value, not long-term relationship building.”
Sutherland: Tech-Driven Management Optimizes for Metrics Distant from Customer Needs
“When you allow tech bros too much power over decision-making, along with their running dog lackeys in kind of management consultancy, You're optimizing for something which may be very, very distant from what your real-world customers really care about.”
Marketing is fat-tailed, making hourly billing a fundamentally broken compensation model
“My argument is that marketing is actually fat-tailed. So is innovation, and R&D, pharmaceutical research, science, ok? In other words, five to 10% of what you do delivers perhaps a 110% of the value, and therefore paying people by the hour and demanding that e…”
Individuals should dedicate 50% of effort to maximizing exposure to positive optionality
“50, 50% of your effort in life, once you ensured the fact that you're not going to starve to death, die, etc., you know, you've looked after your children... Should be attempts to get lucky. In other words, what Nassim would say, I love this phrase increasing …”
Sutherland: Much Luxury Consumption Is Self-Signaling Rather than Status Display
“Quite a large part of this stuff is actually signalling to ourselves. Which is, you know because I'm worth it. I deserve this. I'm the kind of person who drives this. It provides me with a kind of ego boost, a sense of reassurance, whatever it may be.”
Buying a massive television is an economically rational decision for low-income households
“If you haven't got much money, TV as a source of long-term entertainment is spectacularly cheap. So having a really good television on which to enjoy it, because you're not going to go Porsche racing at the weekend, you know, you're not going to be there, you …”
Sutherland: Truly innovative ideas require more marketing, not less
“Big innovative new ideas don't require less marketing, they require more. Because you're asking people to, at the initial stages, you're asking someone to do something that nobody else has done, and you're asking them to do something they haven't done before.”
Tech competitors battle on specs until someone builds a UI that wins
“The lesson of all tech is that loads and loads of geeks compete through, for technological numerical superiority by some measure or other, And then someone else comes along with a cute user interface and makes all the money. It's basically Steve Jobs. Yeah. No…”
Sutherland: Engineers dislike marketing because consumers prioritize human design over technical metrics
“And so their failure to understand the wider context within which they were operating, which is the job of marketing, Is exactly the reason nerds hate marketing, because they think in a perfect world, nerd metrics win out. But the consumer is much more bothere…”
Sutherland: Apple made a mistake by cancelling its urban electric car project
“I lost faith in Apple when they cancelled the car. Because I thought you, they had the brand power to create, for places like New York and London, a form of microtransport, which was really, really cool, really, really efficient.”
Changing human psychology solves problems much cheaper than changing underlying technology
“Do not define an objective which is designed to serve human beings without considering psychological factors, because you might be able to solve your problem very, very cheaply and efficiently by changing the psychology, not by changing the technology.”
Sutherland: The biggest economic waste is great products ruined by bad storytelling
“The biggest source of economic waste is when people produce something that's objectively brilliant, or they produce an invention which should be life-changing, But then they tell the wrong story about it, and it doesn't sell.”
Sutherland: Silicon Valley incorrectly assumes automating narrow tasks makes humans redundant
“This is a criticism I have of Silicon Valley, that what they often do is they take something that a human does, they define its role very, very narrowly, devise an algorithm or a technology which replaces that very narrow role, and then assume that the human b…”
Sutherland: Pedestrians will exploit driverless cars because they always yield without retaliating
“Now, if we take this in in the driverless car situation, we'll know that when we want to cross the road, we just walk out in front of a driverless car, because it's always going to stop. Now, this may cause the passengers in the driverless car to lurch around …”
Big Four accounting dominance is driven by corporate blame avoidance
“So that's why there are only four big accounting firms in the world, ok? If you appoint one of the big four and they cock up, everybody blames PWC or E&Y or whatever, ok? If you appoint a small boutique accounting firm, it may be better, but if they cock up, n…”
Sutherland: Advertising agencies falsely pitch intuitive ideas as sequential logic
“You actually invite the client in and you pretend that you arrived at this insight or flash of imagination through the deployment of sequential logical thought. And of course the whole thing is a complete misrepresentation of what happened. What you did is you…”
Sutherland: Non-utility hobbyists are essential to break out of innovation local maxima
“It was really the hobbyists and the neophiles and the kind of weird people who are doing it for all manner of non-utility based reasons, who are the people who are probably essential if you're to get out of kind of local
Local maxima in innovation in a way.”
Sutherland: Human decision-making prioritizes catastrophe avoidance over outcome maximization
“And so that hunch that actually what we're doing when we make decisions is looking for ways to minimize the worst case scenario. Reliable signals that the worst case scenario isn't going to be that bad or that likely. Almost more than we're attempting to maxim…”
Sutherland: Constitutional monarchy prevents prime ministers from developing delusions of grandeur
“Actually having an arbitrary head of state is actually really good, because it means that if the election doesn't go your way, it doesn't force you to reassess your loyalty to the country. The fact that, I mean, the beautiful phrase also used by, I think it's …”
Sutherland: It Is Easier to Get Fired for Illogic Than Lack of Imagination
“Within an institutional framework, the urge not to break ranks and not to be considered possibly wrong, you know, it's much easier to get fired for being illogical than it is for being unimaginative.”
Sutherland: Tech industry underestimates the value of face-to-face human interaction
“One of the things that I don't think is understood by tech nerds, and if I'm being really cruel, you know, males in general, in many cases, is the extent to which in evaluating any business or experience, the human component of it, the face-to-face component, …”
Sutherland: Publicly Traded Corporations Cannot Do Marketing Well
“With the exception of P&G, Diageo, Unilever, marketing-led companies, I don't think that PLC is, what do you call them in, you know, publicly traded corporations. I don't think they can actually do marketing very well, because the requirement for short-term se…”
Sutherland: Non-Listed Companies Deserve a Trust Mark as They Are More Trustworthy
“We should actually have a kite mark that allows consumers to prefer to buy from companies which aren't listed on some stock exchange somewhere, and hence aren't controlled by the finance function, because they're more trustworthy.”
Sutherland: Call centers are the only way to uncover unsolvable customer issues
“Also, your call center is Is the only way you can find out the problems that people can't solve anywhere else.”
Sutherland: Tech Vendors Captured Finance Departments With Self-Serving Marketing Metrics
“What has happened is that in marketing, for example, the tech companies, the consulting firms that sell stacks, and I owe a lot of this to a guy called Adel Borky, very interesting, self-taught Libyan marketing writer, former boxer, Anil Borky, and I coined th…”
Sutherland: Trial Lawyers Heavily Fund US Democrats to Block Tort Reform
“Particularly because there's no tort law reform in the US, and that's partly because, I was told yesterday, trial lawyers are among largest donors to the Democratic Party because they resist any kind of tort law reform.”
Rationality is merely the bronze standard in creative fields like advertising
“This is what's weird about working in advertising, by the way, and I think it's probably similar to theoretical physics, and it's probably similar to entrepreneurialism, ok, which is what's unusual about those fields, is that rationality is the bronze standard…”
Ogilvy Australia made only $350k on an idea that generated $1 billion
“There's an idea conceived by Ogilvy Australia. It has made that company in excess of a billion dollars in the last 10 years. It's still running. It runs in something like a hundred markets. Still useful today. For that idea, the agency in Australia got paid 35…”
Sutherland: Gillette damaged its business by insulting its male customer base
“Gillette ran an advertisement. They realized they had to move on, perhaps, from the best a man can get, despite the fact, obviously, that their customer base is overwhelmingly male for fairly obvious reasons. And they produced an ad which I would argue, and ev…”
Sutherland: Jaguar could never win head-to-head against German luxury giants
“Jaguar was always trying to compete head to head with BMW, Mercedes, and Audi. And bluntly put, because of the scale of those entities, it was always going to lose. Because if you're the kind of person who's happy to buy a BMW, an Audi, or a Mercedes, and you'…”
Sutherland: Triggering outrage in 1% of people yields free earned media
“In some ways, you could argue it's an ingenious marketing strategy, which is that you press the hot buttons of one percent of the population, so they then repeat your message accompanied by their own Signaling outrage. Meanwhile, you get free media coverage pr…”
Sutherland: Champagne quality is secondary to price as a social signal
“Because in the sparkling, in the champagne business, It doesn't matter how good the drink is. If people think you've bought it for eight 95, it's not doing the job it's supposed to do, which is to signal generosity, to signal hospitality, or to mark your speci…”
Sutherland: Swedish Study Found Sunbed Users Had Higher Life Expectancy
“So there was a study, actually, among Swedes where there was a higher instance of skin cancer among Swedish sunbed addicts, but they actually had a higher life expectancy, which they didn't expect.”
Korean technology and car quality are driven by cultural rivalry with Japan
“The Koreans are going to make fantastic tech and fantastic cars, regardless of the profit motive. Do you know why? To wind up the Japanese. So they've got two motivations, ok? Other people are just trying to make money.”
Sutherland: Accountants, lawyers, and economists hold too much corporate power
“I'm only angry with accountants and lawyers and economists, not because they do what they do, but because they have too much power doing it. And they've achieved a kind of monopoly over decision making, which I don't think they have a reasonable claim to.”
Infrastructure spending is more acceptable than psychological solutions
“Because it's always much more acceptable To spend money on infrastructure than it is to spend money on psychology.”
Sutherland: Intangible Value Is the Most Environmentally Friendly Value Creation
“Intangible value is the most environmentally friendly way of creating value. You don't have to chop down any trees. You don't have to burn any coal. You generate value simply by getting people to look at something that already exists in a more favorable light.”
People view marketing value as cheating compared to engineering
“We intrinsically tend to think that marketing value is kind of cheating, whereas engineering value is the real deal.”
Sutherland: Marketing is costly signaling demonstrating long-term commitment
“Marketing would make a lot more sense to everybody, because a very large part of marketing is really costly signaling. So, you know, the cost of something particularly the upfront cost of something which may only pay off over time is a very, very reliable gaug…”
Sutherland: Multi-year vocational qualifications act as commitment devices that ensure honesty
“If you're prepared to spend four years becoming a cab driver, And four years of your life which you'll never get back is spent reaching that level of qualification. You're patently committed to the job. Secondly, you have a lot of skin in the game because it's…”
People will learn to trap autonomous vehicles with simple visual tricks
“Someone is going to find a way of hacking that driverless car. Within seconds. By which I mean, you know, they'll work out that by putting a particular pattern of balloons on the road, the driverless car basically starts just going around in ridiculous circles…”
Sutherland: Rationality cannot evolve because total predictability is fatal
“It's impossible for anything rational, To successfully evolve, because the byproduct of being rational and efficient, optimally rational and efficient, would be that you'd be predictable. And if you were completely predictable, you'd be dead.”