Yesterday afternoon, my buddy EC and I received a message from Sandi with the heartbreaking news that Bill had passed away peacefully just a couple of hours earlier. While it would be entirely accurate to call Bill Pauli our incredibly loyal, long-time client, he was, first and foremost, an...

If you weren’t there, like Woodstock, I imagine, the summer of 1981 in Los Angeles is impossible to fully appreciate. For months the City of Angels was deliriously captured in the grip of a 20-year-old Mexican lefty, armed with an unhittable screwball and a bashfulness you just don’t see in that...

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...