client finds the head of the agency obnoxious. My personality has lost some contests and won others. Aside: I have resigned accounts five times as often as I have been fired, and always for the same reason: the client’s behavior was eroding the morale of the people working on his account. Erosion of morale does unacceptable damage to an agency. Getting multinational accounts If you get an account which also advertises in overseas markets, you stand a good chance of getting it around the world. I call this the domino system of new business acquisition. J. Walter Thompson, McCann- Erickson and Young & Rubicam built their overseas networks to meet the needs of such multinationals as General Motors, Coca Cola, Esso and General Foods. When I got the Shell account in the United States, Max Burns, the then President of Shell, asked me if I would also like to have the account in Canada. ‘Yes,’ said I, ‘but I don’t have an office in Canada.’ ‘Get one,’ said Max, and that is how I started the network which was to spread to 40 countries. In these cases your competition will be the local agencies in the countries concerned. They have a habit of wrapping themselves in their national flag and appealing to their governments for protection against us foreign invaders. They accuse us of imposing an alien culture, particularly in countries which have little culture of their own, and in some cases their appeals have been heard. The Canadian Government employs only Canadian agencies. In Nigeria, the foreign agencies have been expelled. The fact is that almost all the overseas offices of American agencies are managed by nationals who would not know how to project American culture, even if they were foolish enough to try.