The Average Trap: Why Rory Sutherland Thinks You're Wrong

0:00 There was an extraordinarily clever scientist and they were trying to design the perfect seat for a US fighter plane and so they designed it around the average pilot and that meant average forearm length, average butt size etc. Virtually nobody found the plane seats comfortable and what they discovered is that the number of people who are average in all eight dimensions is incredibly small. But when you take more and more variables and average for all of them, you're actually ending up designing for a customer that doesn't exist at all. If you're in marketing, you've been bullied by the financial rationalist establishment. Business people are comfortable with about 70% of what a business does because it's directly within their control. But marketing and innovation are the two areas which interface with real human beings. And your customers are not, much as you might fantasize about it, within your direct control. If you want to be a resilient business that can cope with whatever the future might throw at you, you've got to place some intuitive bets. In particularly in the 10%, you don't accept a high degree of failure. You aim for it because if you're never failing, you're not being brave enough with what you're testing. There are things you say that make me think differently. I hope so.

1:13 >> And I am ridiculously grateful for that. I am. Welcome to the Action Coach podcast. Action Coach is the world number one in business coaching. This is more than a podcast. It's your blueprint for success. So, grab a pen and paper, take notes, and make sure you hit the subscribe button and notification bell for weekly growth insights. Let's do this. >> BIX 2026 just finished. Wow, what an event. whilst I was busy running the event, my partner in crime, Neil Martin, he stepped in and did some incredible interviews. And one of the interviews he did was with the great Rory Sland, an exceptional speaker in the field of marketing. He's the vice chairman at the Ogulby Group, the world's largest marketing organization. So enjoy the podcast with Neil Martin and Rory Subland. So, here we are in the Max Media pod trailer, Rory, at Biz 2026.

2:19 >> I'm absolutely captivated. I love it. >> You've just come off stage where we surprised you with your mentor as well. >> Yes. So, Drayton Bird made a surprise kind of this is your life appearance which was absolutely moving and fantastic because you know without Drayton I you know none of none of this would have happened. >> So, what's the biggest thing you learned from Drayton? I'll tell you the full story. So, I'm there. I'm training to be a teacher. I'm actually doing a PGC. And I suddenly get a bit of a panic attack where I realized that if I go from school to university and back to a school, I'll end up having spent my entire life in educational establishments and I felt I wanted to do something in the interim. So, I applied to various ad agencies, one of which was Ogalin May the direct, of which then Drayton, I think, was worldwide chairman. And I went in for my first interview and I was basically sitting there waiting to be interviewed by a guy called Mark Davis who was great guy actually. He he's been involved in direct marketing for quite a few years and while I was waiting Drayton came into reception and they said how was your trip Drayton? And he said it was a bit grim because I had to change planes in Addis Ababa or something. I remember thinking, you don't get that in the staff room at school and the whole place just seemed fantastically exotic. And then for our second interview, the final selection thing, Drayton gave a talk to us all and I was just hooked. Now, there are various people, I've got a very good friend, John Goodman, who said the same thing. They effectively went to one of Drayton's talks on direct marketing.

3:50 He'd quite often do this thing where you had to guess which of two advertisements would perform better. And John said he got all three of them right. And from that moment, he was completely captivated. And there's an element to direct marketing which I'm not a gambler but it's there's something a little bit similar which is it appeals to that same instinct of having a hunch betting on it and then being proven right or wrong. >> It it's almost like marketing is like going to the casino.

4:17 >> The odds are stacked in your favor but you still have to bet. >> Yeah. What makes finance people uncomfortable with marketing is that it isn't clear what you'll win on a single hand. Yeah, >> but it's fair to say that marketing as as overall as a casino has pretty good odds. And of course, it is probabilistic. Marketing is probabilistic. It's not deterministic because this is this is my the other person who's a huge influence on me is a guy called Roger L. Martin who's a Canadian business writer and guru.

4:46 And he makes the point that business people particularly boards of directors are comfortable with about 70% of what a business does because it's directly within their control. >> But marketing and innovation are the two areas which interface with real human beings who and your customers are not much as you might fantasize about it are not within your direct control. And so people naturally shy away from it because it seems worldly probabilistic and kind of you know slightly random.

5:20 but that's the real world. >> And I think businesses have created this artificial kind of algorithmic reality where they think the business is all about doing what we did yesterday but in a slightly more efficient way which is the kind of thing that people in finance or procurement are really comfortable doing. The problem you have with that is you become absolutely preoccupied with cost and you completely neglect opportunity. Fundamentally, you don't have any way of getting lucky. If you want to get lucky, at some point you've got to walk into a casino. You've just got to choose the right one. It's almost like I'm trying to think the right way to phrase this. There are some people in a business who would prefer to drive looking in the rearview mirror.

6:04 >> Yes. Because you get much that's exactly because nearly all big data comes from the same place the past. >> Yep. >> Okay. So the past is really data rich. You know a hell of a lot about what happened. The future is of necessity blurry at first and invisible. I mean weather forecasting by the way they found the same thing with weather forecasting. any complex system. And in fairness, computational power and so forth has made a 3, four, five day weather forecast pretty good compared to my childhood. You know, the the you know, the slightly longer term forecasting is a little bit better. Once you get out to about 7 8 9 10 days, it's it actually reaches the realm of the unknowable. You genuinely can't know.

6:47 So, at that point, you should stop trying. You should stop pretending that the data you have will predict the future. and funnily enough, by the way, there's a very funny phrase about that, which is quite an interesting thought experiment, which is, "If you're trapped by a psychopath in a basement, and the psychopath tells you, if you can tell me what the weather's like outside, I'll let you go. Otherwise, you're going to die. What's the single best thing you can say to get to get released?" And apparently, the answer is the same as yesterday.

7:20 >> >> That's the most that's the most accurate description. And so people of course who are hooked on accuracy effectively become very comfortable with that sort of short-termist extrapolation. >> Yeah. >> Ultimately though, if you want to be a really successful business, you want to be a lucky business, actually more important still, if you want to be a resilient business that can cope with whatever the future might throw at you, you've got to place some intuitive bets.

7:45 You can't simply and and Roger El. Martin rages against this because he's both taught at and attended Harvard Business School. And he gets increasingly angry because everybody's told that every decision you make has to be datadriven. And he argues that that is effectively a self-limiting belief that if you can only do what you can prove works, you're only exploring a small percentage of the solution space. And there are other heruristic approaches you can take, which is what's Drayton said this today.

8:16 What do you think everybody else is doing? Right, we'll do the opposite. Y >> there will be absolutely a market in 10 years time for guaranteed AI free businesses just as there was a market for organic foods. >> Yep. Y >> you know, you know, essentially because of the herd tendency of all businesses and the tendency to I would argue cut costs and as I say it's not really cost cutting when you're making your customer pay the price. And I would argue that a lot of businesses will use AI to cut costs in a way where actually they're offloading work or hassle onto their own customers. And I think just as we've had the farmers market as a kind of antidote to Tesco extra, okay, and we have London City Airport as an antidote to Heath Row, I think there is always an opportunity in the underexplored space.

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9:41 I've got a question that goes maybe goes counter slightly to what you just said. >> There's a a guy called Nick Jenkins. Don't know if you're familiar with Yeah. moonpig.com. >> Absolutely. Of course. >> When he was on the Action Coach podcast. >> Yes. >> He said it's easier to turn a mathematician into a marketer than it is a marketer into a mathematician. >> As in so much of marketing is data. >> Very interesting. what's your view on that? So very interestingly I am a mathematician and then to the extent that I did S-level maths and and Alevel maths.

10:12 >> One of my best friends in actually by the way evolutionary biologists make very good marketers, geneticists, people who are engaged in a science but a complex science funny enough. ve people who are very good at statistics are very cautious about the people who are dangerous are bad mathematicians because they think that the numbers are the truth okay what's interesting is you know one of my best friends is Nim Talb you know the this is why I talk about marketing being fat tailed and actually I would agree with him in is he a mathematician I'm intrigued by this because if you understand maths. One of the things is that maths is an extraordinarily interesting problem solving. Yeah. What you what I learned from maths wasn't really the numerical bit that was valuable. The bit I learned from maths, two things. the interpretation of statistics and the fact that they have to be treated with extreme caution. I won't get into the Lucy Letby case here, but that is an example where people have taken a very very literal understanding of probability and I think arrived at completely the wrong conclusion. and now found it very difficult to reverse. So, but a cautious but creative use of statistics.

11:31 Now, now bear in mind, one one thing to be cautious about is averages. This is a Mark Ritson quote. The average is the enemy of the marketer. >> When you average something, which is what finance people do because they collect money for sorry, they collect numbers and money for the purposes of aggregation. you end up with an average where most of the interesting information the really telling information has been stripped out. >> Similarly, if you compress numbers over time, >> I remember >> the information's removed for the purposes of consumption. So, a good mathematician can deal with numbers at a degree of subtlety. I was very much in favor of Rishi Sunnax. what I would have done is I would have said, we'll make maths compulsory into the sixth form, but we're also going to make creative problem solving compulsory. And I would have combined the two because the other thing I learned from maths as well as the statistical side and bear in mind let's be honest okay it's very unusual I come into the office and someone says can you work out the surface area of a cone but what I learned in statistics I use every every day so I'll look at this and go yes but the sample isn't representative or this is just a you know self-fulfilling prophecy and so one of the reasons you need good mathematicians is not because they're slavishly driven by the numbers it's because they know to treat the numbers with extreme caution.

12:48 The other thing I learned from maths is maths is creative problem solving. You rewrite the question. You redefine the problem. There's something that looks completely baffling and then you draw two lines you know on either side of a circle and suddenly a problem that's completely confusing becomes absolutely obvious. So rather tragically, I hate to admit this, I actually watch people solve maths problems on YouTube for fun. So I I don't like to admit that too widely. It doesn't exactly make you look admitted it to the internet.

13:18 >> But the maths is a highly creative discipline. so you know we tend to think of it as numbers and adding up and so forth. taught well and particularly taught I think in a way that you teach it as a vehicle for problem solving. I think it's I think it's absolutely fantastic. I I would totally agree with Nick in that point actually. an an interesting thing around that I mean there's two or three things in in what you've just said that I kind of want to cover first one for me is you know there's a difference between causation and correlation right >> y >> and absolutely >> and but there is a correlation between mathematicians and musicians so the creative of music and being brilliant at maths that there is I've seen statistics don't ask me what the detail is because I can't remember but I've seen statistics that link the two things >> there's certainly a correlation I I know there's a correlation between mathematics and liking the music of JS Bark for example and I've got a vague memory that one of the members of the Bark family was a composer mathematician.

14:21 >> having said that we've got to remember as well that my argument is there's there there's re there's reasoning first progress and there's reasoning backwards progress. And if you become too slavishly attached to the data, you can only reason forwards. >> Mhm. >> Reasoning backwards is this weird thing has happened. Why has it happened? What possible implications might it have? How do we test our hypothesis further? >> And proper science is hypothesis testing. It's not taking whatever data happens to be lying around and then trying to construct some narrative from it. It's let us make a hypothesis from what we already know and then design a test to validate or disisconfirm our hypothesis. And direct marketing direct marketing invented the randomized control trial something like 70 years before medicine cotton on.

15:16 >> So they were doing AB tests with different advertisements in newspapers in the kind of Edwardian age in the United States. This is because newspapers I I've always wanted to find this out. Newspapers were typically printed on two or four presses in parallel in a large circulation newspaper. Then, and I don't know why, by the way, whether it was something to do with manufacturing or production or whether it was at the behest of advertisers, they interled them. So the the output of two press is would go ab a rather than all everything from press A going onto one pile, everything from press B going into a second pile. They were actually interled like you know pack of playing cards.

15:55 >> And the point about that was that effectively every shop would get a random mixture of >> newspapers from press A and you could run a different advertisement on press A than you did on press B. And since of course there wasn't obviously it wouldn't work if North Chicago got all the ones from what versions of one ad and South Chicago got all that that would have messed up your whole sample but they were interled which was good enough for the purposes of randomization and so there's one exception to that there was someone in who tested limes against scurvy in I think the 18th century that was the first sort of randomized control trial which I think was performed by the royal the Royal Navy doctor but the advertising industry caughten onto at 70 years before medicine did.

16:41 >> admittedly there were fewer ethical concerns obviously. I'll give the medics a break. but really really good marketing is an absolutely fascinating mixture of creativity which is imagining the hypothesis considering the possibility that no one's considered before or spotting a variable that everybody's completely neglected or which you can't measure or don't measure or neglect to measure >> because don't forget most company data is collected for the convenience of the finance function. So it's a hell of a lot about transactions and not much about emotions. So it's automatically unrepresentative in that sense. But what I love about this business at its best is it it is that fusion of genuine acts of imaginative you know brilliance combined with scientific rigor which is this might seem like the best idea in the world. what's the best thing I can say really when I have an idea which I think is a great idea. It's not this is a brilliant idea. It's this is worth testing.

17:46 >> That makes a lot of sense >> because if I'm right, it changes everything we do. >> Yeah. Well, and I think also we're in a world now where it's got easier and cheaper to test that if you're wrong, you don't lose very much. >> But the problem is that business is dominated by short-term efficiency, which we tend to see testing as a cost because in the short term it is. It's also dominated by kind of reputational paranoia which is no one wants to be seen to fail. So one solution to this which some media agencies propose is what they call 702010.

18:21 >> 70% is business as usual. We know what works. This is what we do to make money. It worked last year. We'll do it this year. 20% is is aims for incremental improvement which is would this ad be better if we reweed it towards that. Mhm. >> And then the 10% and by the way I think those figures those numbers should vary depending on all manner of factors. It's not a hard and fast rule. The 10% is total blue sky experimentation. And the point is that in particularly in the 10% in you don't accept a high degree of failure. You aim for it because if you're never failing, you're not being brave enough with what you're testing.

18:58 And the justification for this came from Pew Place, someone in performance marketing who specializes in AB testing. And they noticed something which is that the more things people tested, the more successful they were. Now obviously that's in itself relatively benile. But they found that the the effect was disproportionate in that the people who tested eight things weren't disproportionately more successful than the people who tested four. they were significantly more successful. And the only theory he had to explain it, which I think is quite good, is when you're testing eight things, you make room for a couple of really silly ones. You don't just test the things that make sense. You know, price or, you know, the logical stuff.

19:39 You go, you know, you know what? If we put a green arvark in this, you know, in this in this thing, whatever it may be. And I think that makes sense because actually generally the things that are the real breakthroughs are breakthroughs and disproportionately significant precisely because they have an element of illogicality to them because as I often say if there are logical solution to your problem someone would already have found it. You know there are plenty of logical people around. What we have a shortage of is imaginative people. And as I said, it's it's much easier to get fired for being irrational than it is for being unimaginative.

20:19 >> It goes back to the classic IBM. >> No one ever got fired. >> Yeah. No one gets fired for buying. >> And in larger companies, that risk aversion permeates everything. They're fundamentally asking the question, if things go wrong, how well can I defend my decision? Not, can I make a good decision? What's quite interesting about this, >> I don't know if you've been watching The Pit. >> No, >> it's on HBO Max. It's a drama set in an in Pittsburgh.

20:45 And it's very interesting because of course in you're time constrained and you have to make decisions and you accept there's a riskreward tradeoff because obviously time slow and decision making which is 15% better but 100% slower is not very desirable in an Right? you haven't got time to do the tests you'd ideally like to do. So you accept the fact that your decision- making is based on a sort of riskreward payoff.

21:17 It's a very very interesting thing to watch if you're just interested in the whole culture of decision-m whereas obviously as you get beyond the medical decision-m becomes much more risk averse >> and it's interesting because the people in the at one point in season two say we accept the fact that every few years you get sued by somebody >> because if you're not getting sued by somebody in a sense you're probably not doing the job right. you're in an acute situation, you have to make >> you have to be prepared to make mistakes.

21:47 >> Yeah. Yeah. >> The other thing I want to pick up on something you said earlier, you're talking about averages and >> I remember seeing you speak at an event. >> Yeah. >> And you were talking about Air Force fighter planes and averages. >> Oh, that's a very interesting one. Yeah. So when they there was an extraordinarily clever scientist and they were trying to design the perfect seat for a US fighter plane and so they designed it around the average pilot and that meant average forearm length, average thigh length, average you know butt size etc.

22:23 And nobody virtually nobody found the plane seats comfortable. And what they discovered is that whereas quite a lot of people have an average forearm length, the number of people who are average in all eight dimensions is incredibly small. And so an a if you're designing something for the human forearm, let's take the the height of a door handle. Okay, there is such a thing as the average height of your arm. You may, by the way, want the door handle to be high enough so that small children can't open the door and escape. There are all kinds of other motivations you may have, but broadly speaking, the average will work quite well there.

23:01 But when you take more and more variables and average for all of them, you're actually ending up designing for a customer that doesn't exist at all. >> Yeah. And so I think there's something very interesting there, which is what they found is that what you had to have was adjustable seats. And so, you know, this is why I think competition in business, I I was on an economics podcast and I said the great thing about capitalism, if you're an econ, if you're a conventional economist, it's that it solves problems very efficiently because competition drives people to reduce costs. That's sort of true in a bull way.

23:36 >> Actually, the really good thing about capitalism is it solves the same problem in 18 different ways. In some senses, competition is ludicrously efficient. Inefficient. You know, look at the number of and the most extraordinarily inefficient, the most absurd manifestation of capitalism solving for multiple problems is the luxury watch industry. Okay? Because there is a basic Casio which you can buy for £18, which everybody agrees that for the purposes of timekeeping and functionality is basically a flawless watch. The FW9 F91W or something. I've got a I actually imported this from Japan but it was only a h 100red quid and it's a Casio which connects to your phone. So as a result the timekeeping is flawed. It also has motion in pixel by the way. Anyway, sorry to know that if you seriously if you do a deep dive into the watch industry you know there's brand subtlety. people who want to pretend to be pilots, people who want to pretend to be divers, people who want dress watches, people who want gold, people and but the point is that capitalism covers the waterfront much better because companies position themselves against each other and consequently explore a much wider solution space than they would do if they were all focused on the same average customer.

24:50 conscious of time and and bringing this towards a a close and I and I could I could sit and literally talk to you for days, Rory. Okay, let's talk very briefly about a product that I don't think most people would think to design or bring into existence, but we're sat in. I'm absolutely captivated by this because it is the absolute embodiment of what I call reverse benchmarking which is that I think secretly everybody would quite like a caravan just as I believe that all men secretly want to own a shed >> or a canal boat >> or a canal boat or something like this.

25:32 >> The problem is in I would argue for a lot of people is entirely psychological. No, there are practical problems. Where do you store it? I get that. if you you know you actually there are carriage storage parks all over the place if you need that or everybody would like a motor home or something of that kind. The problem is almost entirely image based and what you've done here is this is what Steve Jobs would have had if he decided to become a caravaner. In other words, the fact that it's sort of airirstream inspired the way it leans into design but most of all the use of wood.

26:05 >> Yeah. I mean what you've done. Okay, so when before Steve Jobs came on, actually let's give Johnny IV a bit of credit. Before Johnny Ive designed the iMac, if you put a and by the way, these factors generally don't come out in research, but they're incredibly strong emotional drivers or emotional breaks. If you put a computer in any room of your house in 1993, you'd basically turn that room into an office. You might as well put a photocopier and a filing cabinet in there, you know, and you know, have a have a Saskco wall planner on the wall, okay? Because the computer just said it's a work device. It's beige. It's entirely utilitarian.

26:46 >> Suddenly, Johnny IV and Steve come up with a computer you want to lick. You know, it's actually an adornment to any room in which it appears. It has a fantastic psychological design feature, which is the iMac had a handle. You weren't really supposed to carry it around, but they wanted it to feel like something you could comfortably touch. >> Yeah, that was entirely a kind of psychological hack that not entirely, but the handle was there almost as much for emotional as for functional reasons.

27:18 And if you put a caravan in large numbers of gardens, I live in the grounds of a bloody grade one George Robert Adam Georgian house and my neighbors would go absolutely dally. Okay. If I turned up with a bright white caravan thing, if you put one of these in the wood, they'd be ecstatic. >> Mhm. >> And it's worth noting that, you know, there are certain psychological things. One of the things we know as marketers is the more places in which you can sell, the more you sell. And we always used to joke that the little foil lid on the San Pelgro can, which they they seem to have got rid of, much to my annoyance, >> we called it the access all areas pass because it meant because there was a foil lid on the top of the can, you could have a silver bowl full of those things at your wedding. Okay? Right?

28:10 Because it had silver foil on the top. You couldn't do that with tango really. Okay. And so what's so interesting is that nearly all successful businesses exist because they've solved a complicated concatenation of practical and psychological problems. And an awful lot of modern businesses, I think, have become successful precisely because either intentionally or intuitively or sometimes by just blind luck, they've stumbled on the solution to a psychological problem which suddenly removes an obstacle to purchase.

28:48 >> I'll give you a lovely example of this. There are we were talking about this just a couple of weeks ago. Back in the day, Timitee was a disproportionately successful shampoo. And the theory was that because it was packaged in just green and white packaging, men were totally happy to buy it. And so it it did disproportionately well because all the other shampoos that were targeted at women were to some extent repellent to the male customer. That marbling or pink or you know a picture you know female imagery on the outside.

29:22 Now, the advertising for Timite was a blonde woman bathing in a mountain stream for no readily apparent reason. because we all wash our hair that way, don't we? But it was right. That was also brilliant and probably appeal to men as well to be honest. but it fundamentally it it removed a friction point that was previously existing. Two of the most successful watch makers because I've tragically got into this. Two of the most successful luxury watch makers are Jerger Lutra, I hope I pronounced that right.

29:53 people all seem to get it wrong, and Cartier >> Mhm. >> because men and women buy them. >> Mhm. >> Much more than Rolex, much more than I, you know, I' I've never seen a woman wearing an IWC pilot's watch or whatever. And part of they're bloody enormous, you know. >> I mean, women do wear Rolexes, but to a vastly lower extent than men do. And so the two Welch brands which are disproportionately large compared to the prominence they may have in your own mind are there because they found another market by effectively you know rem removing a bottleneck fundamentally.

30:29 >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Yeah. Taking away some friction. >> I said it already. I could talk to you for hours, Rory. My favorite thing about speaking with you, listening to you, is you challenge my thinking every almost every time I hear your voice. Like whether it's a a Tik Tok of you or it's a podcast with you or it's you on stage at Bisex, there are things you say that make me think differently. I hope so.

30:52 >> And I am ridiculously grateful for that. I am I am one of those mathematicians turned into a marketian. So I I'm a computer scientist graduate, but I did two A levels in math. Like that's my background and I've ended up in >> the best review I got for my book alchemy was from a coder who said what I found so useful about this book it was in the Wall Street Journal was I now realize I've got two strings to my bow not one. I used to think I had to solve the problem with code and with brute force. Now I realize I can solve it with psychology as well. And sometimes it's easier to do the latter than to do the format.

31:27 >> by the way nerd kid seriously marketers nerd out on maths. I think you can turn. It's an interesting question. I think there are popular maths books which people can read. There was one leard leonard lnau called the drunkard's walk. Funnily enough, one of the most important books I read was he's not very well regarded in the world of evolutionary science. Steven Jay Goul's book full house which is sometimes called life's grandeear is all about his statistical reappraisal of life on earth.

31:57 And I'll end with a comment from a mathematician. You'll probably know Steven Wolfrram, right, of Wolfrram alpha. And this is one of the most fascinating insights into business which had never occurred to me before. And when he first said it, I thought and then I realized it was deeply profound. I was in a meeting with him and what he said was that evolution works in life to generate extraordinary, complimentary and inventive life forms because it has quite a loose fitness function. What? Because we always taught sort of the dog in your narrative of, you know, bitter head-to-head competition, red in tooth and claw, all that stuff.

32:34 No, it's really loose loose definition of success. Stay alive long enough to reproduce. That's it. Okay. If you can find the means and the environment in which you can meet those two criteria. Doesn't matter whether you're a patch of moss, a shark, a tree, an amoeba, a bacterium, you get to stay in the game. And if you think about it, what finance is doing, what the city is doing, what investors are doing, what private equity is doing is it's taking businesses and imposing a narrow fitness function which is short-term return.

33:07 >> Okay. Now if evolution had a narrow fitness function which is you must have gills for example and you know the way in which we're we're assessing the the the value of your life form is in terms of how efficiently your gills process oxygen say or how you know okay the overall value of the of the of the ecosystem would be tiny. In fact it's not even clear that the whole thing would work. The fact is that you have so many different environments in which you can attempt to find a an ecological niche in which you can meet those two criteria. And that's what good capitalism is like. It's an endless discovery process of people finding places and markets in which they can survive and meet the criterion of stay liquid long enough to grow a bit.

33:53 >> And what I think the financialization of business is doing is it's imposing a narrow fitness function on so now actually that's what Soviet Russia did. Okay, business success was defined in advance and then your success as an enterprise was simply on how well you fulfilled the requirements of the next 5-year plan. That's a narrow fitness function. What do we know about that? It was Now, I think all that's happened with sort of the shareholder value movement and the you know quarterly reporting is we're creating Soviet style capitalism. We're defining what success means in advance.

34:30 And in a way, we started off thinking we can't really believe in ill evolution because this is all too clever to have arisen from the bottom up. So, let's pretend there's God. My wife's a priest. I got to be really careful about this. But we'll partly posit the existence of God as the creator of all this stuff. What happens in business is most progress happens from the bottom up. But the people at the top want to tell the narrative not about God, but about themselves. Of course, we're successful because of this strategy we designed six years ago.

35:00 Now, some of your success is down to that. I'm sure I'm not I'm not suggesting it's totally irrelevant. 50% of success is effectively being able to take advantage of lucky accidents. And that's where you need a loose fitness function because the titan fitness function will say you can't do that because it wasn't in the five-year plan. David actually Martin Sorrel used to say something amusing which was we don't let our strategy interfere with our tactics. What he means by that is that's a looser fitness function. Yes, we broadly speaking do this and not that. We have made a strategic choice to do more of this and less of that. However, if an opportunity arises to do something we weren't anticipating, we we we don't slap it in the face. Rory, thank you so much for your time. One final but quick question.

35:48 >> Mhm. >> I said my favorite bit is learning from you all the time. What's been your favorite part of this conversation? okay. What I I've got a tip which I give to everybody. If you're in marketing, what has happened is that you've been bullied by the financial rationalist establishment to justify the existence and the value of marketing in terms of what you do. What you said was you change how I think. What I think marketers should do is sell marketing on the basis of what how marketers think, not on the basis of what marketers did or do. And if we define ourselves by what we do, we're painting ourselves into a corner because marketing is two things. It's a state of mind. It's a way of looking at the world and it's a function. And we've in seeking to defend the function by effectively, you know, endlessly deferring to financial people who don't really know what they're doing anyway.

36:44 Okay. What we've actually done is we've destroyed the state of mind. And the state of mind is what makes marketing valuable. It's Mark Richson calls it the 180 degree flip where you look at a business not not looking out but as a customer looking in. And that's why marketing is valuable. That it's also why marketing is essential because if you don't have that 180°ree view, a board of directors with no marketer on it can make decisions which seem totally rational to them.

37:14 but which are utterly foolish when seen from the point of view of the customer and an example of that is I don't think that the spate of shoplifting I think there are a lot of factors behind it some of it is not unconnected with the imposition of selfch checkout in retailers >> fundamentally >> and so what you've done is you've reduced a cost internally for which you claim the credit but you've actually created a great big systemic problem somewhere else for which you're now not being blamed.

37:46 >> You're an absolute genius. Thank you so much for your time, Rory. Total. >> >> pleasure talking to you as always and yeah, look forward to doing it again. >> Oh, envy. Caravan envy. It's not often you talk about that, is it? >> Massive case of caravan envy. The only name you need to know when your business is ready to grow.