Steven Spielberg has made a blockbuster in almost every single genre: science fiction, war, historical drama, fantasy, horror. Meanwhile, Alfred Hitchcock, the master of suspense, became Britain’s most celebrated director by sticking to one.
All Threads
First Direct effectively told people: you can’t visit us in store, because we don’t have branches, but instead we’ll give you brilliant customer service over the phone. The company’s two million customers now get to enjoy an average 39 second telephone wait time versus eight minutes for the wider industry.
In 2018, Swedes coined a new term, Flygskam, or “flight shame”, to describe the embarrassment that travellers feel about their environmental impact. This phenomenon has helped to decrease passenger numbers by 8%, while train travel has boomed.
An app made by aviation geeks – for aviation geeks. According to the CEO, the company’s seven employees still ask themselves the simple question that has informed all of their choices from the start: “What would we want?”
15% of people take 70% of all flights, and over half don’t fly at all.
Owen Maclaren designed the undercarriage for the Spitfire, Britain’s most famous warplane, and years later applied the same thinking to create the first foldable pram. Aluminium rods enabled the plane undercarriage to retract and fold into the fuselage, so he used the same material for his prams.
The answer to health eating lies in defaults. An Oxford University study shows that simply putting healthy meals at the top of delivery app menus results in people ordering 200 fewer calories per meal. On the other hand, sales data shows that calorie labels on restaurant menus have virtually zero impact on behaviour.
In a six-week cafeteria experiment, sales increased with a single evocative addition to the menu; ‘Succulent Italian Seafood Filet’ had 27% higher sales than ‘Seafood Filet’.
The UK wastes over 7 million tonnes of food annually, and a significant portion of that is food thrown away because it’s past the use by date. So the charity WRAP, in partnership with Ogilvy, introduced ‘days on date labels’ – a brain friendly labelling system that displays both the day and the date on the use by label. Although only in pilot stage, the concept has been rated well by consumers and shows promise for the future.
Every fanbase thinks their chants are the best, but they all have the same (surprising) origins. Some are based on hymns, such as “Cwm Rhondda” spawning “You’re not singing anymore.” Others are based on classical music, like Elgar’s “Land of hope and glory.” But my favourite example of stolen creativity: “You’ll never walk alone” comes from the 1945 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel, and is now used by Liverpool, Celtic and Borussia Dortmund.
Football clubs are morphing into media companies: they now make more from sponsorship and naming rights than matchday tickets.
Until the mid 2000s the Premier League was dominated by two managers – Arsène Wenger and Sir Alex Ferguson – who collectively won 11 of 12 titles. But their managing styles couldn’t have been more different. Wenger would stay silent for the majority of the half time break, believing that players needed to calm down before they could think and communicate clearly. Meanwhile Ferguson was synonymous with the ‘hairdryer treatment’ – screaming at players, and in one instance kicking a boot at David Beckham’s head.
In 1974, the three-day week in Britain meant that Saturday became a full working day – limiting attendance at football grounds. Evening matches were a no-go, given clubs were banned from using floodlights. So the only solution was to play matches on Sunday. The idea was initially unpopular – Brian Clough said “if Sunday football comes in, I walk out” – but 50 years later it is now a permanent fixture of English football.
Football clubs use increasingly complicated statistics to assess performance, such as blocks made and touches in the opposition box. But all the data comes from analysts watching games in real time. They note every event that takes place – capturing over 2000 per game – and spend hours re-watching games to ensure quality control.
Sam Bankman Fried and Elizabeth Holmes are just two of the seemingly cursed winners of Forbes 30 under 30. To be clear, they are very much the exceptions – analysis has shown that only 1% of winners run into legal issues – but it’s still interesting that fraud runs rife among the cream of the crop.