From being described as the worst graduate trainee that Ogilvy & Mather had ever hired, Rory Sutherland took a while to find his calling in life. From unlikely beginnings as a classics teacher to his current job as Vice Chairman of Ogilvy Group, his rise through the ranks is unconventional.
Educated at Cambridge, he went on to become the Executive Creative Director and Vice-Chairman of OgilvyOne. Today, he is one of marketing's most original thinkers and influential speakers. Sutherland is a champion of behavioral economics and an early adopter of new technologies.
Rory Sutherland: The Wiki Man is a collection of his writings, including blog posts, tweets, interviews, and more. The paper edition of the book contains visuals but my not be available in the U.S.
Here's a list of what the master of persuasion recommends reading:
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Behavioral Game Theory: Experiments in Strategic Interaction (The Roundtable Series in Behavioral Economics) by Colin Camerer -- brings together and synthesizes a large body of experimental and theoretical work on multi-person interactions, in psychology as well as economics.
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Exotic Preferences: Behavioral Economics and Human Motivation by George Lowenstein -- a collection of journal articles that covers a broad range of topics from the role of affect to biases and intertemporal choice.
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Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard Thaler -- covers ideas of "nudges" in different areas like personal finance, energy conservation, marketing, politics and everyday life.
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The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time by David Sloan Wilson -- about complex adaptive systems, complexity science, emergence, and evolution narrated through stories. The author links the social systems of wasps, the immune system, attributes of neighborhoods, the culture of crows, and the larger economic system, for example.
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The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: With a new section: "On Robustness and Fragility" (Incerto) by Nicholas Nassim Taleb -- for those unfamiliar with Taleb's writing, it's filled with humorous anecdotes. The books is about how observing an event once does not predict it will occur again in the future. This remains true regardless of the number of observations one adds to the pile.
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Identity Economics: How Our Identities Shape Our Work, Wages, and Well-Being by George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton -- there are five ways identity changes economics: 1. Individual actions (e.g. body art and giving); 2. Externalities (e.g. getting along or not, free riders or not); 3. Creating and leveraging categories (e.g. politics, religion, advertising); 4. Identity & regret (buy the book); 5. Choice of identity (mothers versus managers, school choice, immigration with or without assimilation).
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The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good by Robert Frank -- we are not perfectly rational agents intent on maximizing their own gain. Because the relative advantage is what matters, the interest of the individual can often diverge from that of the group, resulting in adverse outcomes for all involved.
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The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life by Robert Trivers -- self-deception helps people to deceive others. The evolutionary benefit of being better at deception outweighs the costs associated with having a biased conception of reality. To support this thesis, Trivers draws from neurology, biology, psychology and history.
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The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt -- drawing on his twenty five years of groundbreaking research on moral psychology, Haidt shows how moral judgments arise not from reason but from gut feelings.
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Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind by Robert Kurzban -- the key to understanding our behavioral inconsistencies lies in understanding the mind's design.
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The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker -- using statistics, he counters anecdotal evidence on how violence has actually been in decline over long stretches of history. This is a thick book.
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The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (P.S.) by Matt Ridley -- makes the case for an economics of hope, arguing that the benefits of commerce, technology, innovation, and change—what Ridley calls cultural evolution—will inevitably increase human prosperity.
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Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions by Gerd Gigerenzer -- most of us, including doctors, lawyers, and financial advisors, often misunderstand statistics, leaving us misinformed and vulnerable to exploitation.
Rory Sutherland brings much of the information and insights he gleaned from his readings into his talks. Below is a more recent one on the lost genius of irrationality, where he discusses the limitations of straight economics in describing and anticipating individual and group behavioral choices.
“We make a mistake by not looking at the world as a network nearly enough.”