'Cribz' With Rory Sutherland: Gadgets, WFH + Where Marketing Goes Next...

now this slightly embarrassing Lee is one of my most prized possessions It's Made in Bristol using raspberry pi and what it is it's a perfect miniature Wi-Fi enabled replica of a station departure board and what it shows me at the moment is all the trains leaving from Seven Oaks which I no longer have to catch because I'm working from home just a little bit of property advice which is you don't have to move that far from London to get nice countryside this is the view from afar from window for example and we're about half a mile outside the m25 so a lot of people think well I'd like to leave London but in order to get something properly rural you have to move to the Outer Hebrides you know and I grew up in the wine valley and what I discovered is there's really nice countryside just inside the m25 towards the periphery never mind outside so a little bit of advice if you do get sick of London don't overcompensate first feature a soft closed lid you can't go wrong with that it means the lid never falls on your genitals in midstream okay then no need to actually stockpile for growth small amount of moisture paper is absolutely necessary but the main feature is this which I can demonstrate hit the button here out comes the proboscis as you can see it actually has a supple it'll stop beat that then when you're finished maybe one or two sheets no more of dry paper just to remove any remaining moisture or failing that you can use something like a duckling or a kitten now here's just one final thing I'm going to big up in my new role as social influencer it's this trespass chair 3995 from Argos I've never been able to find one like it anywhere else in the world and it has a swivel table which you've neither put to one side but more pertinently you can also swivel round in front of you to use as a laptop table if you want to work outdoors now to be obviously honest I don't think the makers intended it for that purpose but as a glorious kind of accident or a magnificent example of unintended consequences it's the only chair that lets you work remotely in the sunshine just a little bit of reassurance that Ogilvy Kent is committed to its role in maintaining a healthy clean environment [Music] something with a little bit of sentimental value somewhere in this astounding group photo is my great-uncle who flew Lancaster's and Wellington's during the war and I think it was sixty missions believe it or not and survived I like it partly because my great uncle's in it but also because I think it's pretty much the greatest group photograph ever taken now this absolutely hideous structure here is my home video conferencing rig one is I bought a mic stand for a music store and then you can clamp or screw various things onto it you can see there say clamped on an t pop filter at the end there's a Yeti microphone which sits just above my head then you have the webcam there underneath it a tablet stand the obligatory ring light you have to have one of those because otherwise if you're backlit you end up appearing on zoom like a pedophile in the Channel 4 documentary you know with your face blacked out and then you have to have a permanent set of headphones and a little tablet stand there what I learnt pretty quickly is that you've gotta have the whole gamut of stuff set up and ready to use permanently in some tiny little space you've reserved in your own home because if you don't do that the problem is you end up with seven minutes to go before some zoom call and you're desperately looking for your sodding headphones which we've gone missing or else you can't find the right USB cable and that's kind of miserable so what you effectively have to do is get a bit territorial and requisition about 10 square feet and then have all this stuff set up and ready to plug in at a moment's notice now having shown you around the edited highlights of my home highly edited I might add you haven't caught a glimpse of my extensive collection of Japanese hentai for example I just like to talk about something very home related and what we've discovered during the commad lockdown is a completely different way of working now even massive flexible working advocates like me two years ago never in our wildest moments proposed that the best way to work remotely is for everybody to go home and never to meet anybody physically that would be deranged under normal circumstances at least but I think it's fair to say that having been forced to conduct this massive global simultaneous experiment we've probably been significantly surprised by how well it's gone with some people some of the time and I absolutely caveat that very strongly not everybody likes this really important to remember this depending on your circumstances this is somewhere between a boon and a nightmare however for a surprisingly large number of people at least some of the time it's been significantly better and there are all kinds of reasons I think why we've never done this before it's much easier for extroverts to bully introverts and the other way around so groups tend to have a natural bias towards excessive travel of activity for instance I noticed with my own team that when I gave them permission to work flexibly no one ever did because they saw it as a concession and they felt they were effectively burning reputation or capital every time they took advantage of it it was only when I said dinner no you don't understand me I actively want you to work from home that people actually took up the option and we two years ago started experimenting with zoom Fridays where everybody worked from home and we met up at the beginning and the end and then had some reasonable time in solitude to get on with high-intensity work if you want to understand this better read a very small literally one-page way for peace by Paul Graham of Y Combinator which is called make a schedule versus manager schedule and it explains how the nature of time is not linear or fungible there are large numbers of people in many roles who need long blocks of discretionary uninterrupted time in order to perform a useful function so you can't simply swap and change about that's the first point I also think that the modern open plan office is neither sociability nor solitude it's a terrible kind of compromise somewhere in between the two I'm not a fan of that either but what I think we can say is that it's extraordinary when you think about it how little experimentation is conducted over what you might call white-collar or managerial or administrative productivity hole technologies are introduced wholesale like email without anybody testing whether they in fact improve or accelerate the performance of useful activity my theory has always been that email slows it down that by making far too much of communication asynchronous it adds a kind of insane delay to decisions that collectively could be taken in moments and just to be a little bit confessional for a moment I think we've all done this thing I'm about to admit to someone sends you an email eight o'clock at night and it's quite important it may even be urgent but it requires 25 minutes intense work and you think oh what do I do now you know I know I'll find a tiny loophole in their request and I'll buy time so you reply and you go great I'd really love to help with this when do you need it by and deep down you're not really asking that question at all you're thinking oh thanks for that I've just bought myself another 24 hours and I can go and watch narcos and when you look at it the absence of experimentation in business life is shocking oK we've never tried to do anything differently at all we've never even looked at alternative possibilities and as a result I think there are large number of people in business jobs who have started to use stress as a proxy measure for productivity and I think this is catastrophic they go I'm really tired I'm really stressed and I'm just got off a plane therefore I must be a very important and useful person now if you look at it blue-collar workers have been tailor eyes measured and time and motioned within an inch of their lives okay and yet the same kind of scrutiny has never been paid to the activities of people in office jobs and I think one of the conclusions we can draw from this crisis is we should have experimented a lot more because it took a massive pandemic for us to even try doing something differently and I think that's a terrible reflection on the extent to which management and managerial positions scrutinize their own activities [Music]

Channel: MAD//Fest London

Views: 1,826

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: Qwm40otuQos

Length: 10min 45sec (645 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 19 2020