Bookstores overflow with ‘how to be a leader’ tomes, often with conflicting advice.
Never a month passes when the likes of Harvard Business Review or Fortune magazine doesn’t opine on the best ways to manage a merger or what to do during the first 90 days as an executive.
And then the consultancies go forward to conquer … (how could we forget?).
Yet there’s one recently published, probably overlooked modest collection of memos, penned by one of the original Mad Men, that we heartily promote browsing. And remembering.
It’s Keith Reinhard’s Any Wednesday, one pagers written almost weekly to his colleagues at DDB Worldwide (now part of Omnicom Group) for some 23 years, covering not just advertising topics, but also musings around careers, communications, and the truth.
Like this: “Our management priorities should be … people, product, profit … in that order.”
Or acquiring new skills: “… because the marketplace of the future will be one where advertising alone is not the answer to every client’s problem.”
And delivered with humor: “The greatest human drive is not food, water or shelter. It’s the obsession to edit another person’s copy.”
It’s not often (okay, almost never) that we recommend a read. But it’s one that will net you a true ROI, in Reinhard’s words: Relevance. Originality. And Impact.