Rory Sutherland

They take the credit for the cost saving and

And then two years later, you know, the hotel's a catastrophe.

The rack rate's fallen off a cliff because the doorman was doing multiple things, many of which were human and kind of tacit.

Security would be one.

You know, there are no vagrants to sleep in the doorway.

Hailing taxis, dealing with luggage, recognizing regular guests, providing status to the hotel.

There are loads and loads of value creation components to that doorman, which aren't captured in the open the door definition.

Yeah, so it's very, very easy.

Management consulting firms, if you're in a business and some management consultants come in, go to the management and say, are they on a gainshare agreement?

A gainshare agreement is a management consulting scam where you claim a certain percentage of the cost savings you identify in year one.

Now, as Roger L. Martin, your fellow Canadian and my own personal Svengali says, any idiot can cut costs, okay?

What takes real skill is cutting costs in a way that doesn't destroy value.

One of the things that I don't think is understood by tech nerds

and if I'm being really cruel, males in general in many cases, is the extent to which in evaluating any business or experience, the human component of it, the face-to-face component, does really, really heavy lifting.

I've got a lovely story to illustrate this, which I think is fantastic.

It's the absolute perfect example of misalignment of optimization through quantification bias.

So wonderful man, Alex Batchelor, used to be the marketing director of Royal Mail, similar to what you have with Canada Post, USPS.

Sorry, not USPS.

Yes, it's USPS.

And they couldn't make any sense of the fact that the brand perception of Royal Mail bore no relation to service levels.