The quickest way from A to B can be the long way round

For me, one of the most important books to be published all year will be Obliquity by John Kay, the economist and Financial Times writer. I am sticking my neck out here since at the time of writing, it has not yet been released. So I am recommending it on the strength of a 700- word article by the author, which he wrote several years ago.

Nevertheless I am looking forward to the book on two counts: first because I look forward to reading it, and second because I look forward to the effect of other people reading it – especially since, given the author's credibility (he was one of the few people to predict the banking collapse), this is a book that will be read by finance directors as well as normal people.

What is the book about? At the simplest level, it makes the fairly obvious point that the best route to point B from point A may not be a straight line. In fact, the best way to reach point B may involve spending quite a bit of your journey heading off at some tangent to the route which appears quickest – or even in the opposite direction. One geographical example is the Panama Canal, which has its Atlantic entrance some way to the west of its Pacific one.

Kay believes that this same principle applies to many aspects of human activity. In business, it is not the firms which set out nakedly to make money which are ultimately the most profitable. Nor is it the greediest people who end up richest. The best way to become happy is not to set out with the aim of being happy.

Kay – who gains additional respect from me as a leading enthusiast for behavioural economics – is giving scientific credibility to the notion that the best way to achieve your goals may be to set off in pursuit of something else.

This raises the question of whether the best way to build brands is to set out with the single-minded intention of brand creation. I suspect brands are much better when they are a by-product of beliefs, principles, goals, ideals, achievements) than when they are a product – just as, in terms of human fame, Margaret Thatcher's is a different kind to Paris Hilton's.

Of course in certain circumstances most people understand this instinctively. All but the most crass individuals know that the way to start a relationship with the opposite sex is rarely by unrelenting pursuit. This is what makes romance such an interesting subject for novels – the fact that seduction is the oblique form of persuasion. The phrase 'I persuaded her to sleep with me' is not one which often accompanies the start of a lasting relationship.

However, while even finance directors appreciate the value of obliquity in their personal lives, in the forums of business and government it is rarely given any weight. This is not helped by the present requirement to justify every action in terms of an immediate payback.

In the past few years a culture of direct pursuit of short-term shareholder value has created a hyper-rational cast of thinking, and a hyperrational cast of people, whose philosophy and approach is deeply inimical to marketing and brand creation – and ultimately value creation.

Sometimes this nuance-free form of thinking manifests itself as 'physics envy' – a deeply felt reductionist desire to create a system of business measurement and control which resembles the workings of a simple machine. It has been bolstered by the efficient-markets hypothesis, the idea that financial transactions tell you all you need to know about your customers, and that all business information can be contained on a spreadsheet. And by moronic approaches such as the Boston Matrix, which assumed that a company created value in the same places it made money – forgetting that most businesses practise intelligent cross-subsidy.

When Woolworths focused on selling high-margin toys and neglected to sell low-margin cotton reels, it didn't end up with bursting tills but with empty shops. A little obliquity would have helped.

This post-Friedmanite consensus in business is one which I hope this book will challenge. The previous approach effectively gave power to people in organisations to misrepresent cost-cutting as value creation. Obliquity makes the point that the best way to create long-term value is not necessarily to pursue short-term gain at the expense of anything else.

But it is also of value to agencies in talking to marketing folk. Previously we always felt a bit nervous suggesting that a dancing animatronic goat may actually sell more cheese than an alphabetic listing of its ingredients. Now we can simply say 'obliquity' and give a sly little nod.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rory Sutherland is executive creative director and vice chairman of OgilvyOne London and Ogilvy Group UK.

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