Ogilvy created a culture like that – one of the strongest in the business. It shares a system of meaning, from his many aphorisms to his blind faith in the colour red. I’m often asked to define that culture. My answer is that it is a humanistic culture, not a mechanistic one. It stemmed from David’s interest in and liking for people (except very boring people, the “dull dogs” he advised agencies not to succor). In this he fell into the same camp as peers such as Bill Bernbach and Leo Burnett, but in a very different camp to Rosser Reeves, his one-time brother-in-law, who seems to me to have been fundamentally mechanistic in his approach to both life and business. When Ted Bates – his agency – was eventually sold (to WPP in 2003, and thus partly merged with Ogilvy & Mather), I remember some of the survivors there describing how completely void of culture it was. It was like they were walking out of a gulag and into a cathedral. Of all the founder cultures, David’s has remained the most intense and vital. (Of course, I’m prejudiced.) My predecessors and I have actively marketed it. It’s powerful, because it combines a view about what good advertising is with some very basic rules of proper good behaviour and civilized etiquette. There is no either/or here. This is a big case of both/and. The happier the agency, the better the work. Someone unkindly once said that joining Ogilvy & Mather was more like joining a cult than an agency. But, it tends to work. As other strong agency brands have found, taking the medicine which we prescribe to clients makes people want to join more and leave less. There is no shortage of theories as to what makes an organization – collectively – courageous. Let me add mine: and it is quite possible that it is distorted by my experience in a creative services agency. I think it is directly related to the degree to which leadership can inculcate a day-to- day sense of being dissatisfied with where you are. The courage emanates not out of grand injunctions to be brave, but out of a sense of insecurity about where you are: that it’s not good enough, that others are doing better, that something’s missing, that you need another leap forward, that if you don’t do something big, you’ll … and so on. Courage is born of discontent. The philosopher José Ortega y Gasset captured this sense of restlessness, a