Episode 156 · 24 December 2024 · 58:56
Rory Sutherland: Unfiltered Full Interview (Part 1) - Special Christmas Eve Episode
Rory Sutherland: Unfiltered Full Interview (Part 1) - Special Christmas Eve Episode
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Why we're not talking about work on Christmas Eve
The psychology of flexible work
Illness, work, and what employers are throwing away
Where Ogilvy's money goes — and who it should go to
The penny post, walking distance, and the history of work
Closing the door means never discovering the upsides
Flexible work as a two-way door
Ogilvy's flexible work policy — and why HR got it right
The net effect of the dual-income family
The centripetal pull of the two-income household
The problem with the two-day weekend
Taking three days off when your mum has a fall
Prisoners of our existing metrics
Money brings choices — and downsides
The 'leisure' that isn't really leisure
Four-day week vs. work from anywhere
Why nobody's core day is a Friday
Retirement, 'gradated' exits, and staying useful
Why those 'working from home is bad' articles are dumb
The leveling up agenda — and a mistake we've made
Show notes
Rory Sutherland: Unfiltered Full Interview (Part 1) — Special Christmas Eve Episode
It's Christmas Eve, and Al and Leanne are doing something a little different. Instead of the usual workplace deep-dive, they're sharing something special: the full, unedited interview with Rory Sutherland — Vice Chairman of Ogilvy & Mather and founder of its Behavioral Science Unit.
Rory's previous appearance (Episode 83) was one of the show's most popular, and this extended conversation delivers even more. Recorded in one sitting, this is Part 1 of the complete interview — no edits, no cuts, just Rory being Rory.
In this first part, they dive into the psychology of flexible work, the hidden costs of the two-day weekend, why "work from anywhere" might beat the four-day week, and the dangers of being prisoners of our own metrics. Rory also shares his take on retirement, the dual-income household trap, and why most businesses don't actually know their customers.
🎙️ What They Cover
The Future of Work — and Why We're Throwing It Away Rory kicks things off with a characteristically sharp observation: flexible work is one of those rare cases where employers have something genuinely valuable in their hands — and they're at risk of giving it up out of "general sort of Luddism." The conversation explores why the benefits of flexibility are real, measurable, and being squandered.
The History of Work — and What We Forgot From the penny post to walking-distance plantations, Rory traces how the geography of work shaped everything from commuting to company culture. The past isn't just interesting — it explains why we're stuck with the structures we have.
The Dual-Income Trap A fascinating thread on how the two-income household became "incredibly centripetal" — pulling families toward cities, pushing commutes longer, and quietly reshaping society. Not a gender point, Rory insists — just a structural one.
Four-Day Week vs. Work From Anywhere Rory's verdict: the four-day week is fine as an option, but work-from-anywhere is arguably more valuable to more people. And Ogilvy's shrewd move? Making nobody's core day a Friday — which doubles as an introvert day for those who want it.
Retiring in Stages "Gradated" retirement — the idea of easing out of work rather than stopping cold — comes up, with Rory arguing that full retirement can be both bad for your health and economically unproductive.
Why "Working From Home Is Bad" Articles Are Dumb Rory takes aim at the wave of headlines claiming remote work hurts productivity, arguing the intelligence behind those articles is often... well, you'll have to listen.
📚 Resources Mentioned
- Rory's Book: Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense
- Part 2 of this interview — available exclusively on the Truth, Lies & Work YouTube channel
👤 Connect with Rory Sutherland
📅 Don't Miss Part 2
Join us on Thursday, Boxing Day, for Part 2 of this extended conversation — plus our predictions episode. And the full unedited interview continues exclusively on our YouTube channel.
Connect With Us
Get in touch, book a call, or find Al and Leanne on LinkedIn — all in one place: truthliesandwork.com/connect
Mental health support: findahelpline.com — UK: Samaritans 116 123 · Mind 0300 123 3393 — US: 988 — Australia: Lifeline 13 11 14
Truth, Lies & Work is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network.
Full transcript
Expand full transcript
Al ElliottThe dirty little secret is that most businesses think they know their customers. They have the data, the records, the history, but it's scattered across 3 teams and 4 systems. And in our case, it's about 216,000 spreadsheets, which means nobody can actually use it. What you should be doing is using HubSpot, because why? HubSpot connects it all— every interaction, every support ticket, every conversation— into one platform every team can work from. So when sales talks to a customer, marketing already knows the full story. And when you know more, you grow more.
Rory SutherlandNice.
Al ElliottCheck out hubspot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. Hello and welcome to Truth, Lies and Work, the award-winning psychology podcast brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals. My name is Leanne, I'm a chartered psychologist. My name is Al, I'm a business owner. We are here to help you simplify the science of work and create amazing workplace cultures. Yes, welcome, welcome. Normally I'd be welcoming you to a Tuesday episode that we'd call This Week in Work, with the surgery, the news, the roundup, the hot takes. But today is different because it's Christmas Eve.
Rory SutherlandMerry Christmas!
Al ElliottMerry Christmas everyone. And let's be honest, who wants to talk about work on Christmas Eve?
Rory SutherlandNot me.
Al ElliottNo, not me. And, uh, you can be damn sure we ain't recording this on Christmas Eve. So instead of talking about work, we're gonna do something we've never actually done before, and we're gonna publish a full unedited interview with one of our guests. And that guest is Rory Sutherland, whose episode is one of the most popular we have ever done. Quick backstory: Rory Sutherland is the vice chairman of a tiny little advertising agency called Ogilvy Mather. Just in case you haven't heard of Ogilvy, it was established in 1948 by the famous David Ogilvy, Rumour has it that Mad Men was modelled on the Ogilvy agency, and currently employs over 17,000 people across the world. Rory is not only the vice chair but also founded the Behavioural Science Unit within Ogilvy back in 2012. He's published 3 books, but the one that really caught my attention was called Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense. If you love a combination of fun research projects, original thinking, and British humour, then this is the book for you. There's something else you need to know. At the interview Adil did with Rory, Rory was almost 2 hours long.
Rory SutherlandIt was.
Al ElliottUm, I don't think Al even got to introduce Rory. Rory just cracked on with it with pure gold. Um, so this is actually part 1, um, believe it or not. If you're listening, um, to the audio-only version of this, then part 2 is available only on our YouTube channel. Uh, just search YouTube for Truth, Lies and Work. And of course, if you're already on the YouTube, then the link to part 2 is in the description. I hope you enjoy this. I know you will. Rory is Oh, and if you're a first-time listener and you like this and you haven't subscribed to the podcast yet, go on, give yourself a little bit of an early Christmas present and press that subscribe button. Okay, Mr. Rory Sutherland, the floor is yours.
Rory SutherlandI'm very, very interested in the psychology of flexible work. Oh, because it strikes me as one of those cases where, um, uh, you know, we're potentially throwing a huge increase, a huge potentially beneficial change in the value exchange between employer and employee. And we're potentially throwing it away if we're not intelligent about it.
Al ElliottWhy are we throwing it away?
Rory SutherlandBecause of general sort of Luddism. I mean, the fortunate thing about flexible work is that employers have at least noticed In most jobs, nobody gives that much thought to productivity except in a very narrow way. And, you know, one of the things that interests me is there's quite a lot of evidence that open-plan offices are bad for productivity. There's a lot of evidence that one of the single best things you can do for productivity is giving people multiple monitors, which again makes let's say hot desking much more difficult. You know, if you want to have multiple monitors, you know, you need a constant place generally. Not essential. But what always interests me is when you do have evidence in productivity, businesses don't really act on it very much. But there's a wider question here, by the way, which is that there's the short-term effects of flexible working, which may be Maybe net negative to a, to a small degree. Then there are the long-term effects, which are almost certainly extremely positive. I don't mean, by the way, fully remote working. I think in certain conditions that works, but I don't think fully remote working for everybody, even in office jobs. Obviously, there are probably 50% of jobs can't be done remotely at all. But in the case of, for example, the question I occasionally ask our clients is, do you want your employees to work remotely? To which the answer might be no. I mean, the more enlightened ones would say yes. But the answer is quite often no. And then I ask a separate question, which is, do you want your customers to be able to work remotely? To which the answer has to be your consumers, because the answer there almost certainly has to be yes, because it increases people's disposable income. And it's worth noting that the interests of the employer and the shareholder are not necessarily aligned with the interests of the employee. There's nothing revolutionary about that assertion, but they're also not necessarily well aligned with the interests of the economy as a whole. So if you have a situation where people have to commute less frequently and indeed can live further away from their place of work and save money, The net effect of that is to take money from the unproductive economy, which is broadly speaking involuntary expenditure, okay, and redirect it into the voluntary economy. In other words, the productive economy. It also helps things like the leveling up agenda. I think one of the other things is you've got to be very sure you're measuring productivity broadly, not just in any given day. Is someone working from home more productive or less productive than someone working in an office? You also have to look at questions like sickness, maternity, you know, for example, compassionate leave or time people have to take off in order to, let's say, act as carers. Now, one of the interesting things there would be, I think it's— I think I'm right in saying this, but there's a very significant reduction in sickness time caused by allowing people to work flexibly.
Al ElliottYeah.
Rory SutherlandAnd I think that's for the very simple reason that there are illnesses which leave you unable to work, but they're a small subset of illnesses that leave you unable to commute. Now, the most obvious case, okay, slightly unpalatable this time in the morning, is, you know, a runny tummy. Okay. Right. If you've got diarrhea or if you've got a major stomach upset, you're probably perfectly capable of sitting at your desk at home within easy reach of toilet equipment. But you can't really make the commute journey into work. Okay, that's— now, that's— it sounds slightly banal, but if you multiply those by millions of people 3 times a year, it's not insignificant. And I know that, you know, I also think that you'll probably see more entrepreneurialism arising from flexible work because a lot of people will put the free time they garner into golf, but there'll be a percentage of much more important people who put their free time they've suddenly gained into a side hustle, a gig. And some of those side hustles will actually prove successful. There's the very simple— there's a very simple argument. But the main reason I'm in favor of flexible work to a degree, and it's obviously what the ratio is, obviously varies. And that does leave a coordination problem, which is you don't want all your team coming in on different days. I appreciate that. I think that's a fair I think that's a fair objection. But I'm also a Georgist. Now, just to explain, Henry George was a 19th century American kind of economist and politician who believed effectively in a land value tax. And his argument for effectively this tax was, I think, unassailable. Yeah. Which is that when you have any form of economic activity, which could be retail, if you like, or it could be office work, which depends for its performance on its location, some large part of the economic gains captured by that work will accrue not to the worker, but to the landowner. And you could argue that London, you know, if you're, if you're a Georgist, you'd say that the commercial property sector in London is not really creative capitalism, it's extractive. In other words, it's rent-seeking. I mean, quite literally rent-seeking. Okay. And what it does is it doesn't add any value in itself. It takes other people's money, exploits effectively a an inescapable need. If you're a retailer, you need to be in a high footfall area. Okay. Now, George wanted an economy where at an airport, it was the retailers who made money, not the person who owns the airport. Do you see what I mean?
Al ElliottOkay.
Rory SutherlandBecause he argued that one of them was rewarding work effort, invention, improvement. The other one was merely extractive. It was a form of taxation. So George's argument is, if this rent-seeking is a form of taxation, at least the gains should in part go to the, the people or the government, rather than to the person who happens to own the land, the person who happens to control the toll booth. Okay. So I think that argument's inescapable. By the way, George is considered— it's considered eccentric to be a Georgist. But lots of people from Milton Friedman to Richard Nixon to Winston Churchill to Vivian Westwood to Brian Eno, I think, to actually pretty much Adam Smith, actually. Let's go right back. Okay. A lot of economists have basically accepted this argument, but no one's done anything about it.
Al ElliottRight.
Rory SutherlandNow, I would much rather the money we earned at Ogilvy went to my employees rather than either to the landlord of Ogilvy's office in London or to their buy-to-let landlord where they live. Now, a lot of people will still— a lot of young people will still want to live in London for perfectly good reasons of— in terms of the opportunities, both in terms of employment And in terms of, well, romantic and sexual opportunities, like which a large city offers you. But at least this gives them the opportunity if they only have to be in London, let's say 2 to 3 days a week. And one of the things I suggested with Ogilvy is let's make our core hours start at 10:30 so people can commute in on an off-peak ticket. They want to live further afield. If you at least give people the freedom to escape the landowner in that respect. Okay, then effectively, it's redirecting money into the productive economy away from the extractive economy. And I think the large gain in property prices in the UK and most other developed countries in the last— well, it's pretty much 20— when was the last time property prices went down significantly until now? It's probably—
Al Elliott2008.
Rory SutherlandIn the late '90s, I would guess. 2008 financial crisis, there was a blip, but then the interest rates went so low that they continued to rise. Okay. It was, I think it's probably in the '90s. Now, I think that's been a catastrophe for the economy. Because I want the money, I want the money going to the people who start, put it very simply, in a sense, I want the money going to the people who start restaurants, not to the people who own the sites where restaurants have to be. And as a consequence, I'm very, very pro-flexible work because I see it as a Georgist technology. Now, if you want to understand Georgist technology, you could argue a motorhome is a Georgist technology. The internet is a Georgist technology because it serves to make location less important. The railways were, in a sense, a Georgist technology for the UK because it suddenly meant you didn't have to live within effectively a mile and a half of work. Okay, you could actually, you know, it made it possible that you have all those commuter towns around London, which were effectively created as a byproduct of the railways. Okay. If you go to the Caribbean, or I think the American South, there's something called a chattel house, which is actually a little portable 2-room house. And these are a legacy of the ending of slavery, where what happened in emancipation was that the plantation owner would say, well, you're now free and I have to pay you a salary for your work. However, you currently live on my land, so I'm going to charge you rent for your house, not unadjacent to the salary I'm paying you, which effectively meant you were still, in a sense, you know, a de facto slave. And the response to this was to develop these little 2-room houses, chattel houses. You see them in the Caribbean still surviving. And the miraculous quality they have is they're portable. You know, 4 men can pick them up and basically move the whole thing. Why does that matter? Because suddenly you could say to your plantation owner where you worked, well, since your rent is unreasonably high, I've spoken to your neighbor who's happy to have me living on his land for a third of the price. And I'm going to just pick up my house and I'm going to move it there.
Al ElliottOkay.
Rory SutherlandSo unless you owned a plantation so vast that people weren't within walking distance, okay, if they lived outside, you suddenly had the upper hand in the negotiation because your home was movable. And I tend to look at quite a lot of technologies through— one of the most important technologies, by the way, I think, was the British Postal Service in 1840.
Al ElliottOh, yeah.
Rory SutherlandBecause previously, if you lived in London, you had a penny post system and it was pretty much same-day delivery, possibly next-day delivery, possibly same day. When they brought in the national penny post, it was effectively a penny post for the whole country. So suddenly you didn't have to be in London just to stay in contact with people regularly and affordably. And so quite a lot of technologies, I think, deliver their value The car being probably the greatest of all, I would say, in allowing people to escape from the constraints of their surroundings. And so the internet and the car and the chattel house are all, in a funny way, solutions to the same problem. And the car, for example, is one of the reasons I'm not against public transportation, but I'm a skeptic about mass transportation. For the simple reason that mass transportation— there's no reason why public transportation can't be individual. If you look at things like, you know, the Heathrow pod system, you know, you can have little forms of public transport which we all share. You could argue— I would argue that Uber is a form of public transportation, by the way. It's consumed at a private level by individuals and families, but it's still an asset to the to the environment in which it sits. And the problem with mass transit is it concentrates people. Okay, whether you're an airport, you know, whether you're an airline and you, you don't— okay, there are literally 100 more places, times more places you can fly to from London Heathrow than there are from Aberdeen Airport, right? And so it creates winner-takes-all effects where human movement tends to get overly concentrated into the hubs. It's centripetal in that sense. Okay. And, you know, what happens is that, you know, why are all hotels historically near railway stations shit? And the reason is then that those hotels are not there because they're good hotels. They're there because of where they're located. Now, when you gave people cars, rather than saying, well, I'll get the train into town and I'll go to the restaurant that's close to the railway station, They could go, this bloke's just bought a derelict pub in the middle of the countryside, but he's turned it into a really good gastropub. So I'm going to drive there. And the extent— it's always fascinating to me. I used to watch Little House on the Prairie, which is a lovely TV series, of course, some fantastic books. But I was— I don't quite understand at first why they really hated the Olsens so much, who are the shopkeeping family within their small town. And then it occurred to me, of course, before the car, your local shopkeeper, particularly if they had a monopoly, basically had you by the balls. Okay. You know, yes, you could buy somewhere else, but it involved literally a one-day journey in a cart to the neighboring town, you know, 15 miles away. And the second Henry Ford came along, the Olsen monopoly was broken. So anything that frees people up from the tyranny of their landlords or the tyranny of locational requirements strikes me as potentially economically valuable. So that, in a very, very long digression, is why I'm very, very— I'm not a total evangelist for complete remote or flexible work, although, you know, you obviously are because you're in Bosnia rather than in London. But I am very, very opposed to people who take a very narrow, Luddite knee-jerk hostile view. We need everybody back in the office. That strikes me as sort of effectively turning your back on a potential game changer. You know, now, this is what Jeff Bezos would call a two-way door. If we try too much flexible working, and in some aspects it doesn't work, we can walk back through the door.
Al ElliottOkay.
Rory SutherlandIf you close the door to begin with, you'll never discover the upsides. Bezos has this fantastic phrase, it's a two-way door. In other words, don't argue this to death because it's a reversible decision. It's something we can test. And therefore, we don't have to get our reasoning absolutely perfect to begin with. Because our process through this in this journey is going to be iterative and informed by experience.
Al ElliottDid you know that the UK's number one management podcast, that's Us, by the way, and the UK's number one marketing podcast are both on the same podcast network. We actually have a lot in common. We both use behavioural science to help people do better at work. And we both had to wrangle Rory Sutherland on an episode. And 2 out of 3 of us are devilishly good looking. And you're not gonna say which. Fel, host of Nudge, UK's number one marketing podcast. It's brought to you— we need to do this in 3s— the HubSpot Podcast. The audio destination for business professionals.
Rory SutherlandSeamless.
Al ElliottSeamless. Tell us about your latest episode, Phil. Uh, we've just done an episode on fake fandom and how New York indie bands are paying agencies to create fake TikTok videos about how much they like their work. And we talk about the behavioral science behind fandom and how that encourages people to enjoy the music and all of that good stuff and do some big things about how this affects the world of pop culture. It is. It's such, it's such a good show. Of course, you'll hear all the stuff you want to hear about how to grow your business by using behavioural science in your marketing. But there's also just some really interesting episodes that'll be right up your street. Personally, I enjoyed Can Balsamic Vinegar Make Beer Taste Better?
Rory SutherlandIt can.
Al ElliottAnd Are We All Just Status-Seeking Monkeys? I am. Go and listen to Lunch wherever you get your podcasts. But come back. Yeah, come back. Definitely come back because Nudge isn't as good as this, so come back. I'll cut that out. Keep that in.
Rory SutherlandFlexible work is a 2-way door.
Al ElliottLet me ask you then, because you've talked there about 2-way door, there's another aspect of flexible work that seems to fit in with this, which is the 4-day work week, which is, which also fits in with your, with your idea of ideas that don't make sense on paper. Because you're reducing, you know, you're paying the same. So what's your thoughts on that?
Rory SutherlandOgilvy has opened the door to that. And I have to say, I'm, you know, it's not often I'm something of an HR skeptic some of the time because I think that those jobs of recruitment and remuneration and reward should actually accrue to practitioners rather than to a separate business discipline. In other words, if you're a creative director, it's your job to hire people, motivate people, incentivize people. And the loss of autonomy among practitioners— you see this in hospitals, okay? It used to be that the doctors ran the hospitals. There were undoubtedly aspects in which doctors weren't very good at running hospitals. But now I think the administrators run hospitals to an unacceptable degree. And it often has what you might call hidden delayed costs, like when you had a very tight team, okay, who all knew each other, they work together in a way that's different from if you assemble teams on the fly to optimize efficient utilization, right? There's a difference between 5 people who work together every day and 5 people who work together 20% of the time. It's not the same kind of entity. Okay, humans have a kind of bonding mechanism. And so this attempt to make individuals fungible, in other words, to optimize what appears to be efficiency, you make the individual and his hour the unit of utilization rather than the team. I think some of that has been driven by what you might call very narrow, counterproductive efficiency-seeking.
Al ElliottYeah.
Rory SutherlandHowever, I have to say, I think Ogilvy HR did the right thing on flexible work. I'll describe our policy very happily. It is 2+1, which is you have 2 core days a week, which are the same for your whole team. So wherever possible, everybody in the team is in at a given time. Now, that also means that you can make better utilization of space.
Al ElliottYeah.
Rory SutherlandBecause effectively, you have, you know, obviously different teams have different core days. Okay. That's the first point. The second point is it's plus one, which is you have one flexible day. The third point, which I was particularly delighted by, is everybody gets 4 weeks a year of what's called working from anywhere within obviously tax and legal constraints. So people who, let's say, you know, have to go and look after their parent after a fall, or indeed want to go to Ibiza, okay, can do so. Okay. And continue to work without taking that as part of your vacation allowance. I thought that was enlightened and really intelligent. The, the final point is that you have 2 core days plus 1 flex day. The flex day is you go into the office on one of your non-core days, unless you have to go and visit a client or go and give a talk or go to a conference, in which case that would count as a flex day. Okay. Now, the final thing they did, which is really smart, or you could just argue realistic, is nobody's core day is Friday. So that opens the door to people who want to work a 4-day week. Now, let's go back. Let's go back to my childhood here, because my daughter said this, so don't shoot the messenger, okay? But my daughter said, there must be some people, okay? And she said some of her friends who'd actually like to be a housewife, right? And there are some men who'd actually like to be a househusband.
Al ElliottYeah.
Rory SutherlandIn my childhood, I can just remember this for most of my father's adult life. Okay, my father's 93. One person with a working-class salary could not very opulently, but could support a household. One salary, wife, 2 children.
Al ElliottRight.
Rory SutherlandThe net effect of the dual income family was first of all beneficial, because it meant that people who were keener on money than they were on leisure could, if they wanted to, work 2 jobs rather than one per couple or per family and earn more money. Okay. And Faye Weldon said this to me. She said, for me and for 20% of women and, you know, so forth, she said at the time, This newfound liberation was absolutely brilliant. Unfortunately, what happened is that it drove up property prices to such an extent that now, never mind a working-class individual, a doctor, a GP, or indeed, as I heard recently, a consultant surgeon cannot really support a household on a consultant surgeon's salary. So a large part of the gains from women entering the workforce went into the pockets of landlords or existing property owners. Okay, not into the actual hands of the people performing the work. And what started as an option suddenly became a necessity. Now, the net effect of that is that the typical household since 1930, okay, has effectively, in order to maintain its quality of life, because of this property effect, and also things like cost of commuting, childcare, etc., okay, you know, okay, a load of other attendant costs that fall on the consumer, because both parties in a relationship have to work. The net effect of this is that the typical family has lost 35 hours of discretionary time per week. With no really corresponding increase in, in quality of life, you might argue.
Al ElliottYes.
Rory SutherlandOh, I would argue, yeah, that you are— you— I'm being daft here. Obviously, people are much, much richer than they were in 1930. I'm not totally blind. But a very large part of the gain that came from having 2 incomes has been mopped up in property prices, because it doesn't also help that when you have 2 people in a family working, it makes cities more desirable. Okay. It's quite easy for, you know, I mean, if you take a very fatuous example, but you have, if you have a bloke working for Goldman Sachs or working in advertising, you've got to be in a city anyway. Okay. But that guy might want to leave banking and go and work in something else. But now wherever he moves to, his partner's also got to find work.
Al ElliottOkay.
Rory SutherlandSo it's incredibly centripetal, that effect of having the 2-income household. Because first, first of all, you've got to, you've got to live more centrally because, you know, okay, my office, my office is right next to Blackfriars Station. Okay. There are lots of places you can live on the whole of the Thameslink route where you have a great commute. But let's imagine my wife worked in London, worked near Paddington.
Al ElliottOkay.
Rory SutherlandThe number of places we can live further out of London where we both have a tolerable commute, if she works in Paddington and I work in Farringdon, or I work in Blackfriars in this case, okay, is fewer and fewer and fewer. So it also places impositions on where people live, because you have to live in close proximity to both of your sources of employment. And so if you— my argument is that a disproportionate amount of the gains from the 2-income household went not to the household. They went to effectively commercial property owners, and, and, and also to buy-to-let landlords and, you know, and property owners who just took the property gains. If you look at the end of Mad Men, okay, that's, you know, that's at the point where the 2-income household is coming in, because, you know, I think Betty works and so forth. And Ogilvy would have been— would have employed a markedly high number of women for the time, certainly compared to actuarial firms or banks. Advertising was very early in the game of employing women, and in senior positions in many cases. Um, now, if you notice, I think one of them, I think it's Pete Campbell, just gets a job with Learjet and moves to California. Okay, you have this extraordinary mobility in the United States, where people would just move 2,000 miles to get a better job. That's died. Because in order to move 2,000 miles, both of you have got to find a better job. And that's a much, much bigger ask probabilistically than one person being offered a better job. 2 people have got to find a better job in the same place, right? So, so these factors don't really get talked about because they only play out over time. But the loss of 35 hours of discretionary time per household, okay, now I'm not making a gender point here at all. Absolutely no reason why it can't be the woman who goes out to work and the bloke who basically goes and sorts out the car servicing and does the shopping and the childcare.
Al ElliottOkay.
Rory SutherlandNot a gender point at all. It's just saying that the units to some extent of older humans tends to be the family. And suddenly, okay, you have this situation where literally, if your car needed servicing, okay, it was a problem. Right? Because when am I going to do this? Now, I had a friend who— I had a friend who had a very interesting observation. He said the bank holiday weekend, the 3-day weekend is perfect. Because you get to do all 3 things. I said, what are all 3 things? He said, at the end of the working week, you need a day where you socialize and you do fun things. You need a day when you catch up with all your admin, you get your car serviced, you go and buy something, you get your shoes repaired, you get your haircut, right? And you need a day where you do nothing at all, just to unwind. Sabbath.
Al ElliottOkay.
Rory SutherlandAnd he said, the problem with a 2-day weekend is you always end up doing 2 of those 3 things. And if you, if you don't have a day where you do nothing, you're tired the next week, basically, because you haven't, you know, effectively recuperated. Okay, if you have a day where you don't— a weekend where you don't do your admin, you get behind and it starts to get really, really frustrating. And if you have a day when you don't socialize, when you're going, well, that was a funny weekend, wasn't it? I did some admin, and then I did nothing. It just feels a bit, you know, there's a, you know, you haven't really rewarded yourself. And so those 3 things, fun, admin, and genuine leisure, the 3-day weekend caters for brilliantly. Now, my argument, my argument is very simple, which is that the purpose of an economy should be to look after families, really, and look after individuals and families and consumers.
Al ElliottOkay.
Rory SutherlandIt's not to optimize, you know, commercial productivity, except to the extent that that actually benefits families. If there's a 2% reduction in productivity, and there's a, you know, there's a 5% to 20% improvement in quality of life, okay, that's just a more intelligent value exchange between employer and employee. You know, at the time when you had non-flexible work, and you had non-flexible hours, There was only one real point of negotiation with your employer, which was, how much do you pay me? Because all the others weren't variables, they were set. I have to be here between 9 and 5, these 5 days a week. I can't do 4 days a week. I can't do flexible work. I can't work from home. I can't move further away from London, whatever it may be. The whole point of capitalism is to continually find more intelligent forms of value exchange. Between transacting parties. And this now adds— okay, interestingly, it means that money is still obviously a variable, but so is terms, conditions, location, and time of work. And that should mean in the longer term— in the short term, there may be a cost because people who were once 5 days a week in the office are now slightly less productive. But if you look at the extent we have, there are huge numbers of people who are out of the workplace really because they have caring responsibilities, they have locational responsibilities which prevent them from doing the 5-day. You know, it's worth noting, actually, I don't want to make bleeding heart cases for office workers because office work is very, very nice and cushy in many respects. But if you do work in Sainsbury's, right, those people swap shifts all the time.
Al ElliottRight.
Rory SutherlandSo if your mum has a fall and you need to take 3 days off, in many, many jobs, not, you know, in many other jobs, there are kind of ways in which you can effectively swap hours. Office work tends to be very, very inflexible in that way in terms of place and time. Now, that has been increasingly ridiculous since there is no longer a technological reason to be in the office. When I started work in 1988, there was a photocopier the size of a small car on the ground floor. There were fax machines. If your clients rang you, they rang you at the office and your phone rang on your fucking desk. Right. Okay. Right. You had to be in the office because if you weren't in the office, you were basically cut off from all the technology that made it possible to interact with people outside the office.
Al ElliottYeah.
Rory SutherlandNever mind the serendipitous encounters with the people in the office. Now, that has been eroding and eroding and eroding with, first of all, you know, you had email, then the BlackBerry, then, you know, nobody had fax machines anymore. Then people started having arguably better kit and broadband at home than they have at work. The reason to be in the office technologically is, unless you have some massive amount of photocopying to do, is basically negligible now. So it's only the social component, the serendipitous encounters, And the, you know, that make it necessary. I would argue that Zoom was to some extent the last piece of the jigsaw there, really.
Al ElliottSo can I ask you then, so with, I mean, you've just made really, really good points about all kinds of aspects of work. You've ticked off about 20 of my questions. A lot of businesses and organizations seem to be obsessed with running engagement surveys, getting metrics and all this kind of thing. When you're saying that the workplace has changed so much, can we actually Run anything like that and measure really—
Rory SutherlandThere's a danger where prisoners of our existing metrics, and that's always a danger with metrics, which is that the metrics you've measured turn out to be less relevant. So I mentioned that fact that, you know, if you're looking at productivity, you also need to look at the number of days taken through illness. Now, since COVID started, the only time I've been ill Since COVID is with COVID Okay, that's the only time I've been unable to work in 2 and a half years. I haven't taken— now, I've had a few days where I've said, I'm terribly sorry, I can't do this physical meeting, I'll have to do it by Zoom because I've got the shits, or whatever it might be. Okay, right. But I haven't actually— I don't think I've actually taken a day off. But actually, I did have flu, but I did cancel my meetings because of flu for a couple of days. But similarly, I now go and see my dad. My dad lives in Wales. What I used to do is have to leave on Friday evening, get stuck in traffic, stay in a very expensive hotel, you know, because it's Saturday night— some— it was, sorry, Friday night, Saturday night— go and visit him, come back. Now what I discovered you can do is you leave on Thursday evening, the traffic's much lighter, the hotel's much easier to book. It's a pub, actually. Okay, but it's generally available. And then I work from home on Friday— I work from hotel on Friday, see my dad in the evening, see my dad in the afternoon, see my dad on Saturday, drive back Saturday evening, absolutely no traffic jam at all. There's a huge gain to efficiency in just effectively offsetting people's activities. One of the gains to flexible work is that not everybody has to commute at exactly the same time. The reason British trains were overcrowded was not really a shortage of trains. It was an excess of simultaneity of transit. Okay. It was a chronological coordination problem much more than it was actually a resources and rolling stock problem. And so, you know, there are most really big problems get solved obliquely. Okay, and most politicians are trying to solve them directly. And I can see about 5 things: the leveling up agenda, the housing crisis, you know, the, you know, to some extent, you know, the social care crisis. A lot of things can be solved when we start to create new forms of employment, by which I mean new forms of value exchange between employer and employee. And the 4-day week forms part of that, by the way. Um, But I don't know what I'd like to know. I know you ask the questions, not me. But my point that the gains from the dual income household went to government in the form of taxes. It went to property owners in the form of price increases, particularly around cities for the reason I gave. It didn't much go to the families themselves.
Al ElliottNo.
Rory SutherlandAnd there's a lot of discretionary time. Just to be clear, I'm not saying feminists, you really screwed up, right? Because nobody anticipated that. And people are always much better off through being able to make choices, okay, that aren't defined or circumscribed by their gender or by social norms or anything like that. Okay. People are basically better off when they can make more choices. I mean, what's wealth? Ultimately, it's more choices.
Al ElliottYeah. Right.
Rory SutherlandYou know, money brings with it more choices. So there's a downside to that sometimes as well, by the way. But broadly speaking, if you give people more optionality, they are better off. There are counters to that, but for the most part, okay. And this is simply bringing people more optionality. And it's about effing time. Because as I said, the gains to women entering the workforce over 30 to 40 years didn't really go where we expected them to go. Because you now have a situation— I'm not making this up— where, as I said, a consultant surgeon cannot afford to buy their one-bedroom flat. This is crazy. The intergenerational unfairness of this is absolutely monstrous, by the way. So the first generation of women to work actually did really well out of it, because the property prices hadn't yet caught up. But the lack of freedom of discretionary time— now, if you look at it, my wife's actually a vicar. And One of the problems you have in the church is that all the people who volunteer are now in their 70s and 80s. And the young people, the younger people, people in their 60s don't volunteer, partly because they've been working. Okay. And they not unreasonably see their retirement as a reward. So they're not getting into any commitment like running this group or preparing a lunch. They're not going to do any of those things. And anyway, they don't want to commit their time because they might want to go on a cruise and Bloody February. You see what I mean? So a lot of that, that 35 hours of discretionary time didn't just go into household maintenance, it went into community maintenance. People helping each other out, right? And that was an economy. It wasn't measured as part of GDP, but it was part of the economy. People with free time doing shit to benefit other people, looking after someone's kids.
Al ElliottRight.
Rory SutherlandAll that kind of stuff. Now, there's an interesting case which no one's looked at, which is one of the reasons people are having children later. There are many, many reasons why people are having children later. But, you know, this is— there's going to be a demographic crisis. I mean, not to the Chinese proportions, but I mean, nonetheless, one of them is you probably need to wait for your parents to retire. So they can help with childcare. Okay. I mean, that's just one of many, many reasons. But previously, okay, you know, bringing up a child would probably involve a whole load of voluntary work from people who— so the extent to which people's lives, people are sort of frustrated is in part, I think, because at the household level, The amount of discretionary time available to just do things that are worthwhile for you and your family, as distinct from your employer, has gone from what would have been probably 80 hours a week to maybe the weekend. Okay. And with that has come the thing, which is I'm not going to do anything voluntary in my community because I, you know, this is the only leisure time I get. It isn't very much. I'm going to make the most of it in a selfish way rather than in a kind of pro-social way. By the way, don't shoot the messenger because the other person who said this to me was Faye Weldon. Faye Weldon, you know, fairly renowned feminist, made this point that this freedom to work was absolutely great for her. She was a copywriter at Ogilvy, which is why I know her, among other reasons. Much way before my time. And, but I got to know her anyway. And she made this point that actually, for a lot of people, the net results were only beneficial as far as working was a choice. It also got a lot of people out of abusive and unpleasant relationships, by the way, and made them no longer dependent on husbands. And so there'd been a lot, a hell of a lot of positives. I'm not disputing that. But purely in terms of time, It hasn't been a great success. So I would argue that the intelligent thing we would have done had we gone back to 1960 is said, okay, if you are going to have both parties in a relationship working, a 4-day week would be a hell of a lot better than the 5-day week. Then you have the problem, okay, that what if, what if only one of you can negotiate a 4-day? Well, there's not much point in having leisure if, if, if one of the, your wife or husband is still going to work.
Al ElliottYeah.
Rory SutherlandRight. You know, that's not really leisure. So it created this. And you get— so you get these unbelievable things, which are just what I call— how would you describe them? It's basically a kind of gridlock. Behavioral gridlock is the way to describe it, using the analogy of traffic. The greatest case of behavioral gridlock of all, which I think is absolutely appalling, is the fact that in the United States, you only get 2 weeks paid vacation. And I don't think there's even any mandatory paid vacation. Most people get 2 weeks. Nearly all Americans would like more, but it's impossible. Who's going to put the bell on the cat? Okay, if you're the first person to demand more vacation, you look like the lazy guy. And a large part of this city flight you see in the United States is basically a middle-class strike. It's saying, I'm not going back to the status quo ante. Because we finally have an upper hand in the negotiation in that when more flexible working became a norm, you no longer hurt your career prospects by being the one person who worked flexibly. The first person to jump in any of those new behaviors always takes a disproportionate hit. And so you have this United States thing where, again, you can only really get to— I think if it weren't for the 2-income household, you probably would have got 3 or 4 weeks of vacation in the United States.
Al ElliottYeah.
Rory SutherlandBut who's going to go first? Right. Because there's no point in me having 4 weeks vacation if my wife only has 2. So that's what I mean by these things, which, by complicating the unit of family and individual employee, to some extent, it gave the employer kind of the whip hand in the relationship. Because the things you would have liked to negotiate weren't worth negotiating. And since you and your partner could never negotiate collectively because you had different employers 90% of the time, or 99% of the time, okay, whole things that would have happened didn't happen. Now, great things happened that wouldn't have happened. As I said, it freed a lot of people from actually abusive and tyrannical relationships or being dependent on their husband for material survival or whatever it may have been. Okay, it was unbelievably positive in some respects. But in terms of things like time and work and money, it wasn't the great success that you might have predicted.
Al ElliottSo we've talked a lot about the history of work and what's happened in the past. I don't think there's anyone more qualified on the planet to talk about what the predictions for work are in the future. What are your thoughts? What's it going to look like in 10, 15 years or even 18 months?
Rory SutherlandI think the 4-day week actually to a lot of people is less valuable than work from anywhere. Because if you are working flexibly, it's one of those problems, which is one of the annoying things is the last number redial button came in at the same time as the push-button phone. And actually, when you had a push-button phone, redialing the last number was a hell of a lot less frustrating. Trust me, when you rang someone up in my childhood with a dial rotary phone and they were engaged, oh shit. Then you put the phone down, pick it up.
Al ElliottThe—
Rory SutherlandOkay, okay.
Al ElliottCan I stop you? Just want to ask you something really quickly because you might know the answer.
Rory SutherlandYou quite often have 2 things arising, the 4-day week and flexible work patterns and work from anywhere, which by the way is something I exhort other employers to look at and I totally praise Ogilvy for introducing it. But the point I'm making, by the way, I don't want anybody to think for a second I'm being a sexist point, making a sexist point here about, oh, it was better when man went out to work, woman stayed home, prepared the meal. What I'm saying is that at the aggregate level of the family, there's been a huge and involuntary loss of discretionary time as a consequence of this.
Al ElliottAnd so the 4-day work week, you think, isn't as big a thing as people are making out?
Rory SutherlandNo, I think it's an option. I think Ogilvy has done a very shrewd thing in making nobody's core day as a Friday.
Al ElliottMm-hmm.
Rory SutherlandWhich partly means, by the way, that, you know, people can use Friday as a bit of an introvert day if they want to go into the office and be a bit quiet. But it also leaves the door open, I think, to people who want to negotiate a 4-day week. So what we haven't talked about here at all, I think we're gonna have to do a second podcast. I think we're gonna have to do a second recording because this is an area that interests me. We haven't talked about retirement. Now, one of the things that strikes me as very unfair to labor related to capital is that you have to choose an absolute hard-set date of retirement. What that means is that you force your employees to play a game of chicken with their own mortality and their own health. Leave it too late, okay, and you have a fantastic pension, but you spend your retirement basically exchanging business appointments for medical appointments or not being very Well, or not being able to travel. Okay, leave it too late is dangerous. Go too early is dangerous. You either run out of money or you get bored. The freedom— one of the things I think that's important is the freedom for employees to taper off towards the end of their working lives. Perhaps only tapering off to zero when they become incapable of doing any work at all is another possible injection of new and entirely voluntary and preferred Employment. Retirement strikes me as fundamentally dumb. The idea that you work 5 days a week and you commute in 5 days a week, and then one day you stop doing that entirely, is a ridiculous sort of watershed moment between effectively money and no leisure and leisure and no money. Okay. Forcing people to make that trade-off at an absolute set date where you go from 100% employed to 0% employed.
Al ElliottYeah.
Rory SutherlandBy the way, I think it's bad for people as well. I, you know, I think what would happen if I retired completely is I start getting like neurotic about my neighbor's tree overhanging my fence or something. You know what I mean? I just exchange one set of worries for— your wife being a business psychologist will know about this. You get these people who kind of retire from some high-demanding job and they just put exactly the same kind of nervous energy into their retirement.
Al ElliottYeah.
Rory SutherlandAs they did into their job. Well, that's both bad for your health and actually economically completely unproductive and probably extremely annoying to your neighbors as well. Okay, so, and your family. So some form of intelligent form of what you might call gradated retirement. Okay, strikes me as another opportunity here. Now, the other one is, the other one is people working 2 jobs. We might, you know, in 50 years' time, we might look back at the time when employers demanded incomplete exclusivity as, you know, in some ways an infringement of people's rights.
Al ElliottDid you just use a word? Sorry.
Rory SutherlandGo on, get a good—
Al Elliottsorry. I just wanted to ask you, I think you used a word, I wrote it down. Was it gradated? I've not heard that.
Rory SutherlandYeah, I think that's the right word. I may have got that wrong. But in other words, being able to retire in step. Where that doesn't work for a chief executive, right? Okay, you can't be a one-day-a-week chief executive. But you know, there must be a lot of retired accountants who could actually be pretty, pretty good accountants 2 days a week. Okay, they didn't— they— those people did not retire because they wanted to stop work. They retired because they wanted to stop commuting.
Al ElliottInteresting.
Rory SutherlandYou know, in other words, they, you know, Okay, imagine this, right? You're an accountant, you're 55, you've got a cottage in Portugal near a golf course. You know, I'm slightly stereotyping the favored leisure pursuits of accountants here, but what the hell? Okay, right. You're not retiring because you don't want to do accountancy. You know, sometimes it's rainy and you can't play golf, and probably, you know, accountancy is the second most exciting thing you do, you know, right? But what I'm saying is you retired because you actually didn't want to do the 5-day-a-week thing, which prevented you being in your cottage in Portugal. There's nothing preventing you doing your bloody accountancy from a cottage in Portugal technologically anymore. It's only sort of behavioral constraints now. It's not technological constraints. The guy, the guy to really interview is a guy at Stanford called Nick Bloom, who's actually a Brit, although he's at Stanford. But he's the guy doing the really heavy-duty research into this. And he's generally what I'd call long-term optimistic. That there's another very interesting paper which is called The Zoom Boom by an economist called Noah Smith. I think that might be the subtitle. But he also sees this as being something which will really deliver the gains to productivity In the, in the medium to long term, not in the short term. I think the data we're getting in the short term is to some extent an irrelevance. We should ignore it. One of the great things about being a human is we have enough vision to go through pain to get pleasure. Okay. And I think this is one of those cases where we should say there will be short-term disruption. I get very amused, by the way, by those reports. I suspect that some of those articles in The Telegraph and The Times ranting about everybody must get back to the office. I suspect they're funded in some shape or form by the commercial property industry, right? If you had loads of articles going, hey, smoke cigarettes, they're great, everybody would say, I bet those are funded by the tobacco industry. Okay. Now, when you get a load of articles going, everybody must get back into the office, there's no substitute for colocation. True, but not 5 days a week. Okay. I suspect a lot of those articles are kind of weirdly funded by the commercial property industry to an extent, or they're just grumpy people who basically are close to retirement and are pissed off that the younger generation might have access to a freedom that they never enjoyed. It's a bit like fagging in public schools. The people who'd been through fagging were the people who were really opposed to the abolition of— actually, American listeners are going to get totally confused by that. So I'm going to stop this. Fagging does not mean what you think it means. It was a system where younger boys acted as personal valets and servants to older boys. And you're okay, right? Okay, I think I better stop that. I suddenly remember the American audience. But there may be an element where old people are grumpy at the idea that they had to work 5 days a week in a bloody office, and they're damned if these young people can get away without doing it. Dog in the manger.
Al ElliottOkay.
Rory SutherlandThere are lots of reasons why those articles are written. I think those articles are dumb, because the intelligent thing to say is this is a worthwhile experiment.
Al ElliottEnd of.
Rory SutherlandOkay, the early stage. But then you've got these articles going, it was found that people working from home were 3% less productive, right? Well, can I make a suggestion? Why don't you get your staff to work an extra half hour a day when they work from home? Because they'll take that swap. Okay, you know, commuting plus getting dressed, having, you know, having a shower, doing all your bloody ablutions. Okay, all that shit's like an hour and a half out of your day, would you say, I'll work an hour and a half an hour longer if I can work from home on any given day? Well, that's your productivity problem solved, right? I mean, it's not difficult. You know, the maths isn't really that hard, is it? Okay, so, you know, get them to work a bit longer. I think that's a worthwhile exchange.
Al ElliottI totally agree. I totally agree. Like you've said all through your book is just that The way to solve a problem is to be a bit more creative and not look at what people— ask people why.
Rory SutherlandActually, don't look— doing it. I mean, the leveling up agenda. One of the great mistakes I think that's been made is that everybody said in order to make these poor places richer, we need to have businesses and industry moving in. Okay. No, you don't. You just need consumers moving in. It doesn't matter where the consumers notionally make their money, right? I once worked with— I once worked with Invest in Kent. And I mean, that, you know, it is very worthwhile encouraging businesses to start in Kent. I'm not saying that's a waste of time. But I did make the point that I said, look, you could also enrich Kent by promoting it as a place to live post-flexible working. Because I said, if the chief executive of Goldman Sachs and his family moved to Kent, that's a hell of a lot of money coming into Kent. Now, Goldman Sachs isn't going to move to Kent. You just get the employees to move together. And, you know, so, you know, the potential actually for people in Liverpool to work London jobs strikes me as long-term. It has to be seen as really exciting. Now, the great thing the UK has here is in the United States— I'm going to make a point here— in the US, you do get the problem where people just move to Austin, Texas, and they're a whole day's flight. In other words, They can't travel into the office for a day or for a, you know, it's a major undertaking. That's not on in my view. Okay, it is in some jobs, in deliberately remote jobs. You can move to bloody Latvia, it doesn't matter, right? But a lot of jobs, that business is not on. The fact that you can't regularly come into the office and commune with the other people, that's a problem. The UK has the advantage that it's small enough. I'm sorry, I think I have to go because I've just got another—
Al ElliottCan I— I have to I hope you enjoyed that. Please do join us on Thursday, Boxing Day, for part 1 of our predictions episode. And then next Tuesday, we're going to do a similar thing. We're publishing the entire interview with the OG of organizational psychology himself, Professor John Amici. Thank you so much. We will see you there. Goodbye. Merry Christmas. I hope you have a nice time. Yes, subscribe, subscribe. Merry Christmas. Merry happy, happy subscribing. See you, see you on Thursday. Rory is not only— I said warry. Do you know what I often think about when we pre-record, especially because this is a Christmas and we're going to drive back to the UK? What if we get killed in a horrible car accident and then this will go out and people will be like, but they're dead? I don't think I'll put that in the outtakes.