Rory Sutherland Audiobooks

Alchemy argues the illogical answer often works, by Ogilvy's contrarian vice chairman

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Who is Rory Sutherland?

Rory Sutherland (born 12 November 1965) is a Welsh advertising executive and vice chairman of the Ogilvy & Mather group of companies – which is to say, a man who has spent his professional life studying why people actually choose things, as opposed to why they claim they do. He is also a writer: a fortnightly column in The Spectator and several books, of which Alchemy: The Power of Ideas That Don’t Make Sense is the one on our shelves.

The Sutherland position is contrarian but practical: the logical answer is not always the effective one, and somebody ought to say so out loud. Few say it more entertainingly.

Rory Sutherland in audiobooks

Our catalogue carries Alchemy, and it is prime audio material. Sutherland’s stock-in-trade is the counterintuitive argument delivered with wit – a spoken form long before it is a written one – and the promise sits right there in the subtitle: ideas that do not make sense, defended until they somehow do. It suits listeners who enjoy being disagreed with entertainingly.

For UK audiences there is a further pleasure in the register: this is British business thinking, dry and faintly mischievous, rather than the airport-lounge pep of the American genre. Commuters should be warned that they will want to quote it in meetings. Resist – or at the very least, attribute.