digest
Short Summary
Main recommendation: when hiring, take bigger risks by hiring people in groups rather than one at a time, because group hiring naturally brings in complementary variety and reduces the pull toward conformity. Sutherland also argues that business is probabilistic, like a casino, and that marketing and innovation are the most interesting, non-deterministic parts of it, which British business culture tends to undervalue.
Key Points
- Business is probabilistic, not deterministic: it is a contest of competing bets on different visions of the future, so business culture that rewards deterministic thinking makes it seem more formulaic than it is.
- Hiring one person at a time pushes toward risk aversion and conformity, because a single failed hire looks like a 100% failure, whereas in group hiring the human brain tends to look for complementarity and variety.
- Marketing is treated as the less serious side of business, yet half of innovation is marketing, since behavioral change to get people to adopt a product is often harder than building the product itself.
- Sutherland describes an Economist science correspondent, an evolutionary biologist, as the most useful contact for understanding marketing, because animals and plants must advertise themselves, which relates to costly signaling theory.
- His own hiring into the Economist came through a high-variance decision: after three strong candidates, the team chose to "take a bet on the weirdo."
Details Worth Noting
- Concrete instructions: When hiring, hire in groups rather than individually to reduce risk aversion and conformity; look for complementarity and variety across the group; accept that some hires will likely not work out, so set aside a share of positions as wildcard hires; and treat a candidate's curiosity and nosiness as valuable traits for work like advertising.
- Sutherland says that because the outcome of a group hire is spread across several people, a single failure represents only a fraction of the risk (for example, one failure among four hires is 25%).
- He cites David Ogilvy, who claimed to show his advertising copy to three other people before presenting it, and argues that a second opinion helps catch messages that are clear to the writer but misleading to others.
- He is critical of hiring that depends heavily on a 2:1 degree, calling it a reasonable heuristic that signals diligence and intelligence, but arguing that hiring has become too low risk and too cautious.
- He notes that he is not very good at hiring himself, admitting he is too seduced by interesting people.
Bottom Line
Sutherland's core message is that business success depends on probabilistic bets, and that treating hiring and marketing as risk-averse, formulaic tasks misses where the real value lies.
