17 CULTURE, COURAGE, CLIENTS AND CASTANETS It’s a sultry spring evening in Seville in the late 1980s. Fatigue and release, the end of another training programme. We’re in the bar. And suddenly there is, from amidst our number, the strident sound of heels on the floor. It breaks the ennui as surely as a storm. The group opens out, and there’s Jost van Nispen, no graceful Andalucian but one of the best direct marketers of his generation. A Dutchman, he moved to Spain and became besotted with it. And taught himself to dance. Nostrils flared, he looks very creditable. And then there’s the sound of castanets. Applause. And somehow that memory – the clack-clack-clack of the castanets – sticks, one of hundreds of such moments in a career, trivial, transitory, fundamentally uninteresting except to those who were there – but accumulating like sediment to create a culture. We are fortunate that David’s opinions are inexhaustibly quotable. As an agency, we treasure his teachings in a little red book of quotations, which serves as a guide to our enduring company culture. It helps if that culture rewards such memories, and treats them as significant. David