It's nice when your children share your Deliveroo Account, as you can check they are getting a balanced diet.
Rory Sutherland
31.7K posts
Rory Sutherland
@rorysutherland
Vice Chairman, Ogilvy Group
The Spectator's Wiki Man.
- Do HR departments ever question the gender balance in HR departments?
- This is just me, but when did we conflate free speech with the right to disrupt things? I don't like football. This means I am free to tweet this. It doesn't give me the right to run onto the pitch with a placard saying "Not my sport."
- Other than washing your hands, the next most important tip is not to watch any 24-hour news channels. If we'd had Sky News in WW2, we'd have surrendered in 1940.
- Will anyone join me me in launching "The Career Ending Conference." Simple idea: everyone speaking is within six months of retirement, and can say what they really think.
- Theory: Working patterns during the Coronavirus outbreak (videoconferencing, working from home, cancelling events) may be no less productive than normal. They simply reflect what the business world would do naturally if it weren't dominated by bloody extroverts.
- Yes, but this is also true of the private sector. Useful functions like HR, procurement and compliance have metastatised into self-serving bureaucracies, leading to a kind of Soviet-style capitalism. Someone in a multinational told me that their HR department is becoming "theWe need to slash back the size of the state, urgently - it is too big, too powerful, too far-reaching. I always thought it was a mess, but since being elected an MP? Far, far worse than any of us realise. Never underestimate the damage a do-gooding arrogant bureaucrat can
- Can I ask a marketing favour of the hotel industry? Can you come up with a better phrase than "Adults Only"? I quite like the idea of no kids, but this implies I'll have to spend my holiday in a gimp mask being molested by random Germans.
- Doner kebabs and curry are often denigrated because drunk men like them. But surely the foods we crave when drunk are the greatest of all foods, since they are what our brains, free of all pretension, really want to eat. Noone ever said "I could kill for a canapé right now."
- For about five seconds I thought this was a ridiculous cover design. Then I realised it is brilliant.
- I want to see the French dressage team take on the British archery team.
- If you ever doubt how clever evolution can be, remember that it will take a year for the brightest minds on the planet to find a vaccine for the coronavirus. Yet 99% of healthy people have an immune system that can crack the problem in under a week.
- All stories about Eton end "The school charges boarding fees of £40,000 a year." But why don't stories about Universities end "The University charges £27,000 a year while providing no food, no housing and staff attention for 4 hours a week"? Schools are cheap by comparison.
- Has nobody made a film of this? It is a truly amazing event. For younger readers, Allen Funt was the creator of Candid Camera - the 1960s precursor of shows such as You've Been framed
