Rory Sutherland Quotes

A flower is a weed with an advertising budget.

the human mind does not run on logic any more than a horse runs on petrol

It is much easier to be fired for being illogical than it is for being unimaginative. The fatal issue is that logic always gets you to exactly the same place as your competitors.

Not everything that makes sense works, and not everything that works makes sense.

Irrational people are much more powerful than rational people, because their threats are so much more convincing.

the uber map is a psychological moonshot, because it does not reduce the waiting time for a taxi but simply makes waiting 90% less frustrating

you are not thinking; you are merely being logical

people don’t do what they say they believe, they do what’s convenient and then they repent,

And in reality ‘context’ is often the most important thing in determining how people think, behave and act:

It’s important to remember that big data all comes from the same place – the past. A new campaigning style, a single rogue variable or a ‘black swan’ event can throw the most perfectly calibrated model into chaos.

Hillary thinks like an economist, while Donald is a game theorist, and is able to achieve with one tweet what would take Clinton four years of congressional infighting. That’s alchemy; you may hate it, but it works.

The most dangerous people were the stupid and energetic people because they’ll always do things and because they’re stupid they’ll do stupid things.

when you demand logic, you pay a hidden price: you destroy magic

it is perfectly possible to be both rational and wrong.

Engineers, medical people, scientific people, have an obsession with solving the problems of reality, when actually … once you reach a basic level of wealth in society, most problems are actually problems of perception

what matters is not whether an idea is true or effective, but whether it fits with the preconceptions of a dominant cabal

The trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say.

To put a value on the digital world by only tallying the money that changes hands is a little like trying to place a value on sex by simply measuring the amount spent on prostitution.

Ever since, in the U.K. they banned smoking in public places, I've never enjoyed a drinks party ever again. And the reason, I only worked out just the other day, is when you go to a drinks party and you stand up and you hold a glass of red wine and you talk endlessly to people, you don't actually want to spend all the time talking. It's really, really tiring. Sometimes you just want to stand there silently, alone with your thoughts. Sometimes you just want to stand in the corner and stare out of the window. Now the problem is, when you can't smoke, if you stand and stare out of the window on your own, you're an antisocial, friendless idiot. If you stand and stare out of the window on your own with a cigarette, you're a fucking philosopher.

The advice I would give to anybody is to be good at two things, not one, know about two things rather than one, and if possible make the two things overlap a bit.

a rich man is anyone who earns more than his wife’s sister’s husband.”)

To what extent are our wants and desires shaped contextually by the lifestyles of those around us, rather than by any absolute need?

Evolution is like a brilliant uneducated craftsman: what it lacks in intellect it makes up for in experience.

You will never uncover unconscious motivations unless you create an atmosphere in which people can ask apparently fatuous questions without fear of shame.

There is an important lesson in evaluating human behaviour: never denigrate a behaviour as irrational until you have considered what purpose it really serves.

Many pretend to despise and belittle that which is beyond their reach.

No living creature can evolve and survive in the real world by processing information in an objective, measured and proportionate manner.

Remember, if you never do anything differently, you’ll reduce your chances of enjoying lucky accidents.

For a business to be truly customer-focused, it needs to ignore what people say. Instead it needs to concentrate on what people feel.

We don’t value things; we value their meaning. What they are is determined by the laws of physics, but what they mean is determined by the laws of psychology.

Henry Ford’s reaction to a consultant who questioned why he paid $50,000 a year to someone who spent most of his time with his feet on his desk. “Because a few years ago that man came up with something that saved me $2,000,000,” he replied. “And when he had that idea his feet were exactly where they are now.

Footballers, who may earn a few hundred thousand pounds a week, come home to their eager WAGs and a stable full of Bentleys and find the most enjoyable thing they can do is play Grand Theft Auto — something you can buy for £20.

Our conscious mind tries hard to preserve the illusion that it deliberately chose every action you have ever taken; in reality, in many of these decisions it was a bystander at best, and much of the time it did not even notice the decision being made.

I was once booked on a time management course and got the date wrong.

A good scientist (DT quoted Einstein) will acknowledge that more than 50% of scientific breakthroughs are reached through post-rationalised ideas, not through sequential logic.

Andy Warhol about Coke: “The President of the United States can only get the same Coke as the bum in the street

As one creative (Chris Wilkins?) remarked to a planner:“You and I both drink from the same well of inspiration. The difference is that you get to piss in it first.

all big data comes from the same place: the past. Yet a single change in context can change human behaviour significantly.

The number of people who think they understand statistics dangerously dwarfs those who actually do, and maths can cause fundamental problems when badly used.

We constantly rewrite the past to form a narrative which cuts out the non-critical points – and which replaces luck and random experimentation with conscious intent.

Engineering doesn’t allow for magic. Psychology does.

Find one or two things your boss is rubbish at and be quite good at them.’ Complementary talent is far more valuable than conformist talent.

And what is the single most important finding of the advertising industry? Perhaps it is that ‘advertisements featuring cute animals tend to be more successful than ads that don’t’.

if you had retroactively applied the rules of scientific rationalism to all of the major scientific discoveries of the past 500 years you would have invalidated most of them. Perhaps most (penicillin, the X-Ray, the microwave, Aspirin, radio, Archimedes in the bath)  were the product of “inspired opportunism”. As he once put it: “a methodology was an ideology Galileo could not afford.

Why are people happy with the idea that nature has an accounting function, but much less comfortable with the idea that it also has a marketing function? Should we despise flowers because they are less efficient than grasses?

It seems likely that the biggest progress in the next 50 years may come not from improvements in technology but in psychology and design thinking. Put simply, it’s easy to achieve massive improvements in perception at a fraction of the cost of equivalent improvements in reality.

Or take the value of Wikipedia. The creation of this is more or less akin to installing a Bodleian library in every house in Britain. Does this massive new wealth register on GDP figures? Not a blip. Or the new availability of blogs and podcasts. Tremendous writers who, just a decade ago, would have been lecturing to half-empty theatres are now read by hundreds of thousands. Again, almost no money changes hands, so not a wiggle in the GDP figures.

Some scientists believe that driverless cars will not work unless they learn to be irrational. If such cars stop reliably whenever a pedestrian appears in front of them, pedestrian crossings will be unnecessary and jaywalkers will be able to march into the road, forcing the driverless car to stop suddenly, at great discomfort to its occupants. To prevent this, driverless cars may have to learn to be ‘angry’, and to occasionally maliciously fail to stop in time and strike the pedestrian on the shins.

I think the first role of marketing is to make a decision easy to make. And that mean firstly clarity in terms of choice, and secondly it means lack of anxiety. So the first role of marketing is not actually getting preference, it’s not actually getting someone to prefer a Philips TV, it’s getting someone non-anxious about buying a Philips.

Before we adopt US working practices, we should remind ourselves that the white American genetic make-up is exclusively drawn from the most restless, obsessive, zealous, neurotic and friendless 5% of the European population. The reason the Pilgrim Fathers were forced to leave these shores had little to do with religion — it was because nobody liked them.

The reason this inefficient process is necessary is because most of the achievements of consumer capitalism were never planned and are explicable only in retrospect, if at all.

As Bob Dylan says in Brownsville Girl: “People don’t do what they say they believe, they do what’s convenient and then they repent.

Take the economist ad —“‘I never read the economist’—Management Trainee aged 42”—it’s a very boring proposition.

It is harder to like something when you haven’t chosen it.

All too often, what matters is not whether an idea is true or effective, but whether it fits with the preconceptions of a dominant cabal.

Trust grows at the speed of a coconut tree and falls at the speed of a coconut.

It is better to be vaguely right than precisely wrong’,

there are no SI units for what really matters.

Now, you know. I think there should be a Ministry that just gets rid of shit that’s really annoying, because actually we don’t have that much of a sense of proportion as human beings.

How do I know I’m right? Well I once got a room full of lefties to admit through clenched teeth that Karl Marx would have despised the organic movement, but would have loved McDonald’s.

I think if you set out to build a great business, you’ll stand a fair chance of building a great brand. I am not equally confident that someone aspiring to build a great brand will build a great business.

Rory’s Rules of Alchemy The opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea. Don’t design for average. It doesn’t pay to be logical if everyone else is being logical. The nature of our attention affects the nature of our experience. A flower is simply a weed with an advertising budget. The problem with logic is that it kills off magic. A good guess which stands up to observation is still science. So is a lucky accident. Test counterintuitive things only because no one else will. Solving problems using rationality is like playing golf with only one club. Dare to be trivial. If there were a logical answer, we would have found it.

Ask people about their mobile phone, their Sky+, their broadband connection … goods which would have seemed miraculous to our grandparents … and within a minute or so you’ll be listening to morose complaints about the monthly bill.

The same is true of scientific progress. It is easy to depict a discovery, once made, as resulting from a logical, and linear process, but that does not mean that science should progress according to neat, linear and sequential rules.

People who are not skilled at mathematics tend to view the output of second-rate mathematicians with an high level of credulity, and attach almost mystical significance to their findings. Bad maths is the palmistry of the twenty-first century.

Don’t design for average. Metrics, and especially averages, encourage you to focus on the middle of a market, but innovation happens at the extremes. You are more likely to come up with a good idea focusing on one outlier than on ten average users.

I have a soft spot for the religious practice of saying grace before a meal, since paying attention to good things that one might easily take for granted seems a good approach to life – a pause to focus attention on a meal should add to its enjoyment.

.”…On the way home, we were getting pissed at Bordeaux airport, and asked each other what could be the greatest gift you could give your children. Moray and I gave some kind of inane account man answer, “Ferrari” I suspect. Paul’s answer was “a sense of wonder.

Let me give a simple example. The Uber map is a psychological moonshot, because it does not reduce the waiting time for a taxi but simply makes waiting 90 per cent less frustrating. This innovation came from the founder’s flash of insight (while watching a James Bond film, no less*) that, regardless of what we say, we are much bothered by the uncertainty of waiting than by the duration of a wait. The invention of the map was perhaps equivalent to multiplying the number of cabs on the road by a factor of ten – not because waiting times got any shorter, but because they felt ten times less irritating.

A knowledge of the human physique is considered essential in designing a chair, but a knowledge of human psychology is rarely considered useful, never mind a requirement, when someone is asked to design a pension scheme, a portable music player or a railway. Who is the Herman Miller of pensions, or the Steve Jobs of tax-return design? These people are starting to emerge – but it has been a painfully long wait. If there is a mystery at the heart of this book, it is why psychology has been so peculiarly uninfluential in business and in policy-making when, whether done well or badly, it makes a spectacular difference.

Property porn: The unquestioned assumption, widely propagated in countless television programmes, that home improvement is the highest form of self improvement. If we never again see another programme in which some vapid idiots mince around redecorating a house, our lives will have gone up in value by over 30%

I call it the Louis XIV test: have a look around your house and imagine what Louis XIV would pay for everything you own. Your house? He wouldn’t keep a horse in it. Your furniture? Complete rubbish. Your car? He’d like your car. But he’d give you half of Burgundy in exchange for the small telly in your bedroom.

The theory is that free markets are principally about maximising efficiency, but in truth, free markets are not efficient at all. Admiring capitalism for its efficiency is like admiring Bob Dylan for his singing voice: it is to hold a healthy opinion for an entirely ridiculous reason. The market mechanism is loosely efficient, but the idea that efficiency is its main virtue is surely wrong, because competition is highly inefficient. Where I live, I can buy groceries from about eight different places; I’m sure it would be much more ‘efficient’ if Waitrose, M&S, Lidl and the rest were merged into one huge ‘Great Grocery Hall of The People’.

All that property porn, you know, about people buying a flat, doing it up and making thirty grand, it’ll just turn the whole bloody country into a nation of speculators, all the while making property completely unaffordable for anybody under 40. The average age of a first time buyer in the Thatcher era, about ‘84, was 25, it’s now 39.

This distinction matters a great deal. Unlike short-term expediency, long-term self-interest, as the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers has shown, often leads to behaviours that are indistinguishable from mutually beneficial cooperation. The reason the large fish does not eat its cleaner fish is not because of altruism but because over the long-term, the cleaner fish is more valuable to it alive than dead. The cleaner fish in turn could cheat by ignoring the ectoparasites and eating bits of the host fish’s gills instead, but its long-term future is better if the big fish becomes a repeat customer.* What keeps the relationship honest and mutually beneficial is nothing other than the prospect of repetition.

Later on, economists got their own version of the same depressing idea that nothing can be created or destroyed. ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch,’ they said. The sad consequence is that no one believes in magic any more. Yet magic does still exist – it is found in the fields of psychology, biology and the science of perception, rather than in physics and chemistry. And it can be created.

Strangely, as we have gained access to more information, data, processing power and better communications, we may also be losing the ability to see things in more than one way; the more data we have, the less room there is for things that can’t easily be used in computation. Far from reducing our problems, technology may have equipped us with a rational straitjacket that limits our freedom to solve them.

At its worst, neo-liberalism takes a dynamic system like free market capitalism, which is capable of spectacular creativity and ingenuity, and reduces it to a boring exercise in ‘how we can buy these widgets 10 per cent cheaper’. It has also propelled a narrow-minded technocratic caste into power, who achieve the appearance of expert certainty by ignoring large parts of what makes markets so interesting.

As I have argued, psycho-logic and psychophysics need to be applied not just to the design of televisions, but also to welfare programmes, tax, transportation, healthcare, market research, the pricing of products and the design of democracy. There is no point in struggling to create changes in objective reality if human perception can’t see it, so all these things need to be perception optimised for humans.

However, misunderstandings are all too common, because Dutch conversation tends to be astoundingly direct, while British English is oblique and often coded to the point of derangement. In a business context a Dutchman might say, ‘We tried that and it was shit, so we won’t do it again,’ while an Englishman intending to say the same thing might say, ‘I think it might be a little while before we try that again.

Holidays in far-flung places: In an effort to upstage each other, rich people were obliged to visit increasingly far-flung and dangerous parts of the world on holiday. Machu Picchu is, in truth, a collection of ruined buildings that would be fairly irritating to visit even if you weren’t forced to suffer altitude sickness in order to do it. As Dr Johnson said of the Devil’s Causeway: “Worth seeing, but not worth going to see.

Here’s Ogilvy’s contemporary, Bill Bernbach: ‘Human nature hasn’t changed for a million years. It won’t even change in the next million years. Only the superficial things have changed. It is fashionable to talk about the changing man. A communicator must be concerned with the unchanging man – what compulsions drive him, what instincts dominate his every action, even though his language too often camouflages what really motivates him.

When you demand logic, you pay a hidden price: you destroy magic. And the modern world, oversupplied as it is with economists, technocrats, managers, analysts, spreadsheet-tweakers and algorithm designers, is becoming a more and more difficult place to practise magic – or even to experiment with it. In what follows, I hope to remind everyone that magic should have a place in our lives – it is never too late to discover your inner alchemist.

Behavioural economics is an odd term. As Warren Buffett’s business partner Charlie Munger once said, ‘If economics isn’t behavioural, I don’t know what the hell is.’ It’s true: in a more sensible world, economics would be a subdiscipline of psychology.* Adam Smith was as much a behavioural economist as an economist – The Wealth of Nations (1776) doesn’t contain a single equation. But, strange though it may seem, the study of economics has long been detached from how people behave in the real world, preferring to concern itself with a parallel universe in which people behave as economists think they should. It is to correct this circular logic that behavioural economics – made famous by experts such as Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, Dan Ariely and Richard Thaler – has come to prominence. In many areas of policy and business there is much more value to be found in understanding how people behave in reality than how they should behave in theory.

The Netflix documentary Sour Grapes is a fascinating insight into this world. A crooked, though brilliant, Indonesian wine connoisseur called Rudy Kurniawan was able to replicate great burgundies by mixing cheaper wines together, before faking the corks and the labels. He was rumbled only when he attempted to fake wines from vintages that did not exist. I am told that it is possible to detect a forged Kurniawan wine by analysing the labels, but not by tasting the wine. I hate to say this, but Rudy was an alchemist. Several experts I have talked to in the high-end wine business regard their own field as essentially a placebo market; one of them admitted that he was relatively uninterested in the products he sold and would sneak off and fetch a beer at premium tastings of burgundies costing thousands of pounds a bottle. Another described himself as ‘the eunuch in the whorehouse’ – someone who was valuable because he was immune to the charms of the product he promoted.

The term affordance refers to the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used. [. . .] Affordances provide strong clues to the operations of things. Plates are for pushing. Knobs are for turning. Slots are for inserting things into. Balls are for throwing or bouncing. When affordances are taken advantage of, the user knows what to do just by looking: no picture, label, or instruction needed.

mentioned earlier in this book that there are five main reasons why human behaviour often departs from what we think of as conventional rationality. The first of these is signalling, the need to send reliable indications of commitment and intent, which can inspire confidence and trust. Cooperation is impossible unless a mechanism is in place to prevent deception and cheating; some degree of efficiency often needs to be sacrificed in order to convey trustworthiness or to build a reputation.

You know, at Cambridge I suppose my friends from college would have been a few modern linguists, a couple of historians, four mathematicians, a couple of architects, an anthropologist, etc. You know, a total mix of people who all hung out together. I think that’s hugely beneficial. I think actually that’s the best thing to take from British universities; the rest of the teachings you can take or leave but the college system is really smart, you know, it’s a really, really good idea to bundle people together.

Like bees with flowers, we are drawn to reliable signals of honest intent, and we choose to do business where those signals are found. This explains why we generally buy televisions from shops rather than from strangers on the street – the shop has invested in stock, it has a stable location and it is vulnerable to reputational damage. We do this instinctively; what we are prepared to pay for something is affected not only by the item itself but by the trustworthiness and reputation of the person selling it.

Japanese is a highly context-sensitive language, but then so are all languages. In British English, when said in the right context and tone, ‘You stupid fucking idiot’ can be a term of affection – something that can wrongfoot Americans, who mostly speak the same language but tend to interpret it more literally.* In translation, it is an enormous mistake to assume that what the translator conveys is what the speaker intended, and it is equally foolish to assume that what you intended to say is what will be understood.

Geim says of his approach to science: ‘I jump from one research subject to another every few years. I do not want to study the same stuff “from cradle to coffin”, as some academics do. To be able to do this, we often carry out what I call “hit-and-run experiments”, crazy ideas that should never work and, of course, they don’t in most cases. However, sometimes we find a pearl . . . This research style may sound appealing but it is very hard psychologically, mentally, physically, and in terms of research grants, too. But it is fun.

Interestingly, one influence was doing both sides of something—both of which were useful—A-levels: classics and maths. Which is a bloody schizophrenic choice but actually looking back, are the two things I would say that everybody ought to be taught. I think everybody ought to learn a language —not necessarily Latin or Greek, but a language like German which has case endings, which teaches you the rudiments of grammar because the benefit of that is you can then sit down and write an English sentence and know whether or not it’s okay.

It wouldn’t matter much if only Goldman Sachs, say, or a few elite institutions used this criterion, but when everyone else copies the same approach, it is ludicrous. Since almost half of graduates should by definition fall below this hurdle, it will either result in thousands of people spending three years at university for no benefit or to grade inflation in universities, with degree classes becoming meaningless.* This is another example of people not using reason to make better decisions, but simply for the appearance of being reasonable.

There is a parallel in the behaviour of bees, which do not make the most of the system they have evolved to collect nectar and pollen. Although they have an efficient way of communicating about the direction of reliable food sources, the waggle dance, a significant proportion of the hive seems to ignore it altogether and journeys off at random. In the short term, the hive would be better off if all bees slavishly followed the waggle dance, and for a time this random behaviour baffled scientists, who wondered why 20 million years of bee evolution had not enforced a greater level of behavioural compliance. However, what they discovered was fascinating: without these rogue bees, the hive would get stuck in what complexity theorists call ‘a local maximum’; they would be so efficient at collecting food from known sources that, once these existing sources of food dried up, they wouldn’t know where to go next and the hive would starve to death. So the rogue bees are, in a sense, the hive’s research and development function, and their inefficiency pays off handsomely when they discover a fresh source of food. It is precisely because they do not concentrate exclusively on short-term efficiency that bees have survived so many million years.

Metrics, and especially averages, encourage you to focus on the middle of a market, but innovation happens at the extremes. You are more likely to come up with a good idea focusing on one outlier than on ten average users. We were discussing this recently in a meeting when a round of sandwiches arrived. ‘This proves my point exactly,’ I said, pointing at the food. The sandwich was not invented by an average eater. The Earl of Sandwich was an obsessive gambler, and demanded food in a form that would not require him to leave the card table while he ate. Weird consumers drive more innovation than normal ones. By contrast, it is perfectly possible that conventional market research has, over the past fifty years, killed more good ideas than it has spawned, by obsessing with a false idea of representativeness.

After all, no big business idea makes sense at first. I mean, just imagine proposing the following ideas to a group of sceptical investors: ‘What people want is a really cool vacuum cleaner.’ (Dyson) ‘. . . and the best part of all this is that people will write the entire thing for free!’ (Wikipedia) ‘. . . and so I confidently predict that the great enduring fashion of the next century will be a coarse, uncomfortable fabric which fades unpleasantly and which takes ages to dry. To date, it has been largely popular with indigent labourers.’ (Jeans) ‘. . . and people will be forced to choose between three or four items.’ (McDonald’s) ‘And, best of all, the drink has a taste which consumers say they hate.’ (Red Bull) ‘. . . and just watch as perfectly sane people pay $5 for a drink they can make at home for a few pence.’ (Starbucks)*

seems astonishing now, but the predictions of the future I read as a child assumed that meals would be replaced by parcels of nutrients consumed in handy tablet form – it was for some reason thought that the purpose of food was to provide the necessary minerals, vitamins, protein and energy, and that the job of the food industry was to supply them in as efficient a form possible. Some forward-thinking people had defined food’s function narrowly, in order to create a rational model of what the food industry should do.* In this focus on scale and efficiency, people lost sight of what food is for; while it is, of course, a form of nourishment, it also serves a host of other ends. The proponents of delivering food in pill form had lost sight of the fact that it is enjoyable to eat and a necessary prop at social occasions.* Even if such pills could be produced, it is perfectly plausible that people who ate only such food would be utterly miserable.

A few years ago, the British chocolate manufacturer Cadbury’s received a large number of customer complaints, claiming that they had changed the taste of their Dairy Milk brand. They were at first baffled, because the formulation hadn’t been altered for years. However, what they had done was change the shapes of the blocks you would break off a bar, rounding their corners. And smoother shapes taste sweeter. Truly. Nothing about perception is completely objective, even though we act as though it is. When we complain that a room is hot, there may be no point at which we agree about what ‘hot’ means; it may merely mean ‘a few degrees warmer than the room I was in previously, to which I have become acclimatised’. ‘Time flies when you are having fun’ is an early piece of psychophysical insight. To your watch, an hour always means exactly the same thing, regardless of whether you are drinking champagne or being waterboarded. However, to the human brain, the perception of time is more elastic.*

Even stranger than our teeth-brushing behaviour is our preference for stripy toothpaste. When it first appeared, in a product called Stripe, it aroused a great deal of debate over how it was made. Many people dissected the empty container; others froze a full tube and then cut it open in a cross section.* What was strange was that nobody ever asked ‘Why?’ After all, the moment toothpaste enters your mouth, all the ingredients are mixed together, so what was the point of keeping them separate in the tube? There are two explanations: 1) simple childish novelty and 2) psycho-logic. Psychologically, the stripes serve as a signal: a claim that a toothpaste performed more than one function (fighting cavities, tackling infection and freshening breath) was thought to be more convincing if the toothpaste contained three visibly separate active ingredients. In general, people are impressed by any visible extra effort that goes into a product: if you simply say ‘this washing powder is better than our old powder’, it is a hollow claim. However, if you replace the powder with a gel, a tablet or some other form, the cost and effort which have gone into the change make it more plausible to the purchaser there may have been some real innovation in the new contents.

The mythical ‘butterfly effect’ does exist, but we don’t spend enough time butterfly hunting. Here are some recent butterfly effect discoveries, from my own experience: A website adds a single extra option to its checkout procedure – and increases sales by $300m per year. An airline changes the way in which flights are presented – and sells £8m more of premium seating per year. A software company makes a seemingly inconsequential change to call-centre procedure – and retains business worth several million pounds. A publisher adds four trivial words to a call-centre script – and doubles the rate of conversion to sales. A fast-food outlet increases sales of a product by putting the price . . . up. All these disproportionate successes were, to an economist, entirely illogical. All of them worked. And all of them, apart from the first, were produced by a division of my advertising agency, Ogilvy, which I founded to look for counter-intuitive solutions to problems. We discovered that problems almost always have a plethora of seemingly irrational solutions waiting to be discovered, but that nobody is looking for them; everyone is too preoccupied with logic to look anywhere else. We also found, rather annoyingly, that the success of this approach did not always guarantee repeat business; it is difficult for a company, or indeed a government, to request a budget for the pursuit of such magical solutions, because a business case has to look logical.