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Keywords: Marketing, behavioural economics, psychology Title: Alchemy Author: Rory Sutherland Publisher: WH Allen ISBN: 978-0753556504 Media: Book Verdict: Recommended — a thought-provoking and fun read

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Alchemy is not the usual type of book we review on TechBookReport. It's not directly about software development, technology or science — but it casts a light on all these and more. So, if it's not about any of these, what is it about? Subtitled 'The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense' — the book is a highly readable exploration of the counter-intuitive in marketing, design, economics and politics and more. It's a fun read, interesting and entertaining in equal measure but with an underlying message that sometimes inverting logic and not doing the logical thing is actually the best thing to do.

The book is organised into seven sections, each containing a series of short chapters — all illustrating various points in support of the author's eleven 'rules of alchemy'. These rules range from the short and sweet: 'Dare to be trivial' or 'Don't design for average', to things like 'A flower is simply a weed with an advertising budget' or 'Solving problems using rationality is like playing gold with only one club'. In other words, a mixture of sound advice and statements which are deliberately playful and provocative.

So what is alchemy in the sense that Sutherland uses it? It's the magic that ignores common sense, appears to fly in the face of reason and yet works beautifully. Why does it work? Because at heart we're not the logical, rational creatures we like to think we are. One example that he quotes is about the design of a cockpit for a high-speed plane. You'd think that designing the cockpit for the average man, (and in the 1950s air force pilots were all men), would be the right thing to do. But in fact what they found was that the average man did not exist — none of the 4000 pilots they measured matched the average height, weight, reach and ten other bodily dimensions. Designing for the average, a logical choice, was precisely the wrong thing to do.

There are lots of other examples throughout the book, from diverse areas of life — sports, software design, politics, science and more. The book is sprinkled liberally with facts and figures, personal anecdotes, ideas from psychology and economics and lots more. It is laugh out loud funny in places — you certainly come away from this thinking that Rory Sutherland is the sort of guy you'd have a drink or three with. But this is more than a surrogate memoir from a marketing man. There is some real meat here — particularly when it comes to exploring our inner biases and our illogical and resistant nature. There's a lot here from behavioural economics and the ideas of 'nudge'.

In the end, this is a hard book to pigeon-hole, but it works and it's a really good read. It is thought provoking and interesting — there is a lot you can take from it. How easy it is to translate some of what you learn here into daily practice is an open question. It depends in large part on your working environment — standing up and presenting an idea that is counter-intuitive and seemingly illogical is no easy task? But, Sutherland suggests, sometimes it's the only way to get to a good solution.