Today's complex business problems can't be solved one silo at a time, and the modern fetish for measurement is not helping, writes Rory Sutherland.
David Ogilvy once remarked that, in the course of his working life, there was only one big idea he had failed to sell. The prospective client was a large paper company, and it had asked the Ogilvy agency in New York to produce a corporate advertising campaign. David had the Scotsman's visceral horror of self-indulgence, and most likely despised the kind of chest-beating, self-congratulatory advertising that this particular client might have bought in a heartbeat. He...