Why You Should Sweat the Small Stuff

When marketing bigwig, funny guy and prolific twitterer Rory Sutherland spoke at TED, what was his topic? Not the usual earth-shattering, epoch-making questions that upend business or society as we know it, but instead the small stuff -- and how we should, in fact sweat it.

"Our own sense of self-aggrandizement feels that big, important problems need to have big, important, and above all expensive solutions attached to them," he argues. But in our perpetual egotism and haste to manage the humongous project, we often miss the small, cheap and completely effective solution. What companies need, he concludes, is a Chief Detail Officer with lots of power and very little money.