Rory Sutherland: belief

Transcript context

…Maybe as a final question, is there anything you want to leave listeners with, folks that are building product? Any lasting piece of nugget or advice? Try and do the psychological and the technological and the economic for that matter. In other words, the sweet spot is it works psychologically. It works technologically and it works economically. In other words, you can make money out of it. People want it and it allows them to do something significantly new by using some clever application of tech. Try and use those three things in parallel because I think what most businesses do is they try and do things in series and businesses borrow an awful lot from the Fordist Taylorist production line mentality of the process. And the process, we have to pretend that the process is linear, but the process of any kind of innovation or development is not linear. They're loads of products, which by the way have completely failed at first iteration, and then someone sold them in a different way and they then turn out to be completely successful. The Pivot is an example of that. Famously Wrigley started off selling soap powder in Chicago. Then he started giving away baking powder free to sell the soap powder, and then realized he'd start making baking powder and selling that, and he gave away chewing gum that went on the baking powder as a gift. And then people liked the chewing gum a lot more than they liked the baking powder. So as a result, Wrigley became a chewing gum company. But we're always trying to make this thing linear because when we tell stories backwards, we post-rationalize and we reverse engineer and we reverse engineer our actions to make it all seem perfectly linear and logical as a self-check. The real process is never like that. And I think you should have marketing. Marketing and innovation are two sides of the same coin. As I often say, you can either work out what people want to find out a clever way to make it, or you can work out what you can make and find a clever way to make people want it. And actually the greatest things manage to do both. Simple as that. Don't do it one than the other. Don't leave marketing to the last minute, but equally work in parallel as far as you can. Where can people find your book and Nudgestock? Point them real quick.…

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