On January 19, 1998, I wrote a Monday Morning Memo titled, Creativity is an Inert Gas. It was published as chapter 89 in The Wizard of Ads. These are a few of its paragraphs:

Moments of emotional recovery are the best times to think about problems you have not been able … Read more   

And Tried To Warn Us Three Years Ago
I met Greg Farrell in 1999 while on a book tour promoting Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads. We shared a bottle of red wine at the Waldorf-Astoria’sBull and Bear… Read more    pub. Greg and I hit it off and we stayed

Elizabeth was a young Quaker girl who fell happily in love and got married in 1929. “Morgan Vining, my husband, swept my little boat out of the shallows into the sunlit depths of life’s stream and we had almost five years together before, in a single moment, he was gone.”… Read more   

It’s like you’ve asked him to defend his religion; the business owner who believes in growing his businesses through exceptional service delivered byextraordinary people gets testy when you ask him to name a business that has successfully employed this strategy.
It’s like trying to convince a believer there is no God.… Read more   

… Read more   
Dealing with Rejection

Advertising salespeople are highly paid because rejection hurts. They told me to rub Zig Ziglar on it, but the sting and the ache stayed with me. I was 20 years old.
The smiley seminar speaker said, “Look in the mirror each morning and repeat these affirmations.”
Sorry,

If I told you our experiment was constructed specifically to test radio versus newspaper, I’d be lying.  Like most discoveries, we stumbled on this one by accident.
Here’s how it happened: Lifestyle Centers of America is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to lead you and me to a healthier,… Read more   

The Medium is Not the Message… Read more   
Marshall McLuhan’s famous line, “The medium is the message,” is at best a Japanese koan (ko-ahn.) You know, “What is the sound of one hand clapping,” and all that? I’m sure I’ll get a thousand ranting emails about this, but I’ve always felt koans

The thinnest human hair is half a million angstroms thick. Typing paper is a million angstroms. Yet the layer of quicksilver that turns plate glass into a mirror is only 700 angstroms thick. It would take 714 such layers to equal the thickness of a hair, yet it’s this impossibly… Read more   

“The fundamental shortcoming of most mission statements is that everyone expects them to be highfalutin and all-encompassing. The result is a long, boring, commonplace and pointless joke. Companies are all writing the same mediocre stuff.”
- Guy Kawasaki
Most organizations try to define themselves by telling us what they believe… Read more   

MAY 14, 1990 – The cover of Sports Illustrated… Read more    showed a pistol being shoved into the back of a high school kid. Those were the days when an alarming trend swept this land of purple mountains, majesties, above the fruited plains.
Kids were killing for tennis shoes. Remember?
JUNE, 2008