Manage To Change

Perception, Reality, & Rory Sutherland

My husband recently pointed me to an interview with Rory Sutherland and the following video of his TED Talk.

Similar to Predictably Irrational and Nudge, Sutherland's view is that people don't make decisions on pure economic value alone.  Intangible value plays a large role, although many are loathe to admit it.

"There is a basic view that real value involves making things, involves labor.  It involves engineering.  It involves limited raw materials.  And that what we add on top is kind of false.  It's a fake version and there is a reason for some suspicion and uncertainty about it." [Quote transcribed from the video.]

Sutherland believes that 1) all value is relative, subjective, and 2) persuasion is better than compulsion.

"...how many problems of life can be solved by actually tinkering with perception rather than that tedious, hardworking, and messy business of actually trying to change reality."

While his extreme (and tongue-in-cheek) example of "placebo education" may seem dangerous and General Mill's approach to selling Shreddies (a cereal sold in Canada) may seem ridiculous, there is an element of value here - and some plain common sense.

"It's not that marketing-driven or advertising-led solutions can solve everything. That's absolutely not true. What seems strange to me, though, is that people don't at least try them first. Instead, governments try to solve their problems by compulsion. My view is that we should try and solve the problem by persuasion, and if that fails we can try compulsion or harder-level nudging."

It's worth the 16+ minutes to watch the video.  His examples are both brilliant and incredibly entertaining.

(Kent Anderson, from the Scholarly Kitchen, also wrote about this in his post Can the Creativity of Social Persuasion Cure "Corporate Asperger's Syndrome"?)

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• Life lessons from an ad man: Rory Sutherland on TED.com (ted.com)
• Click Here: the Shreddies legend (thestar.com)
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Google Wave: When More is Too Much

We're talking about Google Wave over on the Scholarly Kitchen.

Google Wave was built to answer the question, “How would email look if it were invented today?”  But Wave goes far beyond email-like functionality and tries to get to the heart of communication in all the forms that we’ve come to know.  Wave is part email, part IM, part Wiki, and part document management, to name a few.Ann Michael under, The Scholarly Kitchen, Oct 2009

Come join us!

Movin' on Out

Through the years I’ve been fortunate to meet lots of smart people in publishing, media, and technology.  It’s been an amazing experience working with both organizations “going digital” and others that have been there for some time but are continuously refining their approach to content and publishing. 

It’s an exciting place to be (scary, but exciting).

It seemed to me that the best way to ensure a spot in the middle of the changing tide was to start consulting on my own again.  So that’s what I did!

Please stay tuned as I revive this blog and keep posting on Twitter.