BE GOOD AT TWO THINGS feat. Rory Sutherland: Vice-Chairman of Ogilvy UK | Every London Office

my name is Rory Sutherland I'm the vice-chairman of Ogilvy & Mather in the UK and we're here based in C containers on the south bank in London I also write a weekly column to The Spectator called the wiki man my job is to persuade people in all walks of life that quite often the best way to solve the problem is by changing the way people think rather than changing physical reality my greatest life lesson is really that whatever you do in life try and be good at two things that are perhaps interconnected so I read

somewhere that you don't like the term career you might say that the danger with career is it encourages too much forward planning let's be honest I mean half of the job titles in this building didn't even exist when I joined the industry so I can't remember what it is but I mean there's a very large percentage of people in London who have a kind of Job Description which literally did not exist in 1995 head of content and so if that pace have changed exactly the idea of having a career and planning what you want to

do as though you can is really a little bit of a pretense so what would you say to a young person today like me I mean I don't feel that young anymore I'm nearly 30 but I feel like well I have just dabbled in so many different things and I feel under a lot of pressure especially you know when I was trying to get a job in the creative industry in advertising you know they would look at my CV and be like well what are you that actually is one of the worst aspects of employment

which is that we employ to fill positions rather than employing people and then working out roles around them one of the things I would recommend is serving a certain degree of randomness certainly early in your career in the long term pays off yeah because it gives you versatility and it gives you Bret the idea that the modern employee in truth has to be good at more than one thing or at least you have to be very good and with depth in one thing but you need to have Brett than a variety of related fields you

read classics at Christ's College you joined a girl V in 1988 as part of a graduate trainee scheme where you were named the worst graduate trainee that Ogilvy ever hired then you were fired from the planning department sent to creative yeah I reapplied okay you became a copywriter five years later you were executive creative director of Ogilvy one yeah and now a vice chairman of oka Vuk how the fact that people's early stage careers are slightly messy or nonlinear shouldn't be in any way a mark of shame as work gets in some ways more and

more specialized time spent around finding out what it is you really want to do isn't really wasted it may seem it may seem so at the time but actually a surprising amount of what I were learned even being a bad account person is still a value to me today I think there's actually a very interesting problem which I almost counts as a paradox which is the more people want to make recruitment look fair and methodical and rigorous the more homogeneous it becomes the only problem about applying the same criteria to everybody is that everybody you

choose is then the same the one thing I would confidently say is an extraordinary ability at anything is kind of interesting to work as a decent agency the mixture of people isn't just a byproduct it's actually essential to the functioning of any agency the one quality I always look for in people is curiosity the one thing that would be a deal-breaker I think in employing someone in an advertising department in a creative role would be someone who is fundamentally and curious this actually brings me onto the Pepsi ad quote that I had for you which

is a trial by social media and how basically correct me again if I'm wrong but everyone within the advertising industry saw that ad and was like yes this is wrong with it that's wrong that's wrong everyone outside of the advertising industry was like there are some problems with that ad which is what the hell's Kylie Jenner doing there it was it was a little bit - I'll tell you what it was it was kind of like it's it's some strategic brass straps were showing and it didn't get away with it and it's worth remembering that

when you do any of that kind of issue based or what you might call mission based advertising you're walking a pretty fine line now if there are thousands of people misunderstanding you're adverse spent willfully or not you've got a problem yeah what actually happens instead is that ten people misunderstand it express their outrage in the old days newspaper reporting actually involved getting out of the office and going and visiting people to canvass their opinions and therefore mad people with extreme opinions were difficult to find because there weren't very many of them on Twitter if you

want to create a scandal all you do is go there'll be some mad people here oh look here they are hashtag blah blah blah cut and paste what are the newspaper too easy too easy and it's the mainstream media not the social media that are most to blame because they take what is a totally minority whack-job opinion and they make it seem a mainstream opinion what we need to do is stop trying to actually create solutions around media instead we want to go actually go back to basics understanding human psychology motivation and what causes people

to act as they do I think as they do and decide as they do and we got to go back to the basics of human psychology and then once we've understood that we can decide which if any of these new media might be appropriate to solving the problem this is from your book saying the most dangerous people were the stupid and energetic people but the clever and lazy people ranked highly in some ways there's an aspect to laziness which is not totally disconnected from the creativity which is you'd rather sit and think about an easier

way of doing something then plow in and try and solve a problem by brute force yes so there probably is some sort of correlation in people between idleness and ingenuity what things that fascinate you the most other than trains carry houses a true life crime and air crashes yeah yeah yeah I'm interested in all of those for to an insane degree a lot of people in this business of weirdly fascinated by train I'm a tiny bit on the spectrum a little bit on spectrum what is the most interesting thing you've learnt about human behavior probably

the extent to which our actions precede our our reasons that a large part of consciousness seems to delude us that we think and reason and then act the way we pretend we think act on the side doesn't bear that and the way we're convinced we think act aside dustman much relation to the real cognitive reality where you direct your attention affects what you deemed to be important you can't control what you feel is important but you can control where you direct your attention and thereby hack yourself into changing your priorities and the things that matter

to you are you afraid of anything in the future every creative person slightly has that fear that they lose the ability to do it I slightly worry about this what happens when standards of appearance become so high that they become ridiculously time-consuming I think that's happened oh gosh I wanted to have I want to have rules in overly to save women having to worry about fashion that we'd actually for four days out of every five fifth day you can all get dressed up do your thing right the for the first four days everybody will wear

like overalls a bit like it you know you know those headquarters of a James Bond villain James Bond villain everybody goes around in red overalls you know the great thing about those things is those villains didn't have to spend a load of time game do I wear the blue overalls do I wear the red overalls so the other form is just okay I mean here it is just the orange jumpsuit placement look fantastic yeah Department on see this is pretty good idea okay quick fire what's the best lesson we can learn from the past too

deep don't worry about it are you successful yeah I'm it to the extent which is if I fell off a cliff tomorrow I wouldn't feel I've wasted my life yeah have you ever failed yes lots what country is making the best advertising it's harder and harder than ever to generalize but Brazil and Latin America always had some fantastic staff ever have ideas oh yeah really I guess yeah not only that you have to have some ideas the most vital thing in an ad agency is you have a culture where it's okay to fail or be

cynic creating a culture where in which you can make stupid suggestions and still get promoted Beatles or stones did yours ask Beatles or stones at all quickfire questions Beatles or stones those they're stones actually scrambled or fried fried tweedle looks like more tweed the only fried you can't make I've certain trumpet you can make eggs benedict with fried eggs it's better than poached really yeah and Bacon's better than ham basically a full English breakfast that I bother what's the weirdest thing you ever had Tabasco on I put capacitor virtually everything I've heard on porridge what

food is not improved by the addition of cheese cheese and the only one I can think of is the food that isn't improved by adding cheese probably sprawls do you think no I could still work nasally honest yeah it would work hold on hold on and then we can end this I worry about like this is eternal [Music]