Today’s release of Paul Newman’s long-anticipated memoire, “The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man” strikes me as a good occasion to post this essay I wrote a few years ago. Hope you enjoy. “Old age and treachery beats youth and inexperience.” That’s an old saying, but it was new to me when I...

The Queen (Editor’s note: First published March 2008 when I was based in London as Ketchum's European CEO) __________________ Have you ever seen a ballroom full of nervous grown men and women? I’m talking handwringing, sweat-on-the-upper lip, need to hold a champagne flute with both hands kind of...

My parents used to get one or two phone calls a month from Mr. Lefevre, who would complain in a world-weary voice that I was being too “disruptive” in his high school biology classroom. In J-school at USC, we were taught to challenge, provoke, to never accept anything at face value. When I began...

Back when Chiat/Day was the undisputed hottest agency in all the land, I used to work with a super smart guy who floored us in a leadership meeting one fine morning by declaring we weren’t in the ad biz anymore. Nope. That day we became purveyors of “persuasion.” We all got excited and a little...

It would be no exaggeration to say that Bill, the man pictured in the middle here, was also at the center of Bob Thomas & Associates, our mighty, incredible agency in Redondo Beach, Calif. Bill was our primary client lead at Nissan - by far our largest client - so for a client-first agency, being...