of partnership – a shared sense of responsibility for the results. One danger of the partnership syndrome is that it creates blindness in agency people as to the real amount of time a client actually has to spend talking with us. We fail to see the pressures they face; the other priorities which pull them; the inconvenience which time wasted through a poor response can cause. Thinking too much about partnership can lull us into a sense of security. We are a service business – and our partnerships are only as good as our last piece of work was liked (or, less importantly, worked). David intuitively recognized this. And is quite explicit about it. He was quick to point out where processes were slowed down and produced bad advertising in the process. As he remarked in his book: One of the biggest corporations in the world allows five levels to chew up its advertising. Each level has the power to veto, but only the Chief Executive Officer has the power of final approval. Don’t strain your agency’s output through more than two levels. I think the reason for this lies in the fact that while, for accountants, sets of accounts are, in the main, objectively assessed things, we have to sell, after all the strategic work is done, a product on which opinions will always contain some subjectivity. Cajoling, encouraging and assisting a client through the process of committing eventually to something subjective requires service skills with a higher-than-usual emotional component. Successful advertising people are hard-wired for that after years of experience. That is why it is challenging for clients successfully to cross over to the other side: there are few examples, and I would be hard put to name any who have been highly successful. Quite simply, it’s difficult to turn from master to servant. So however much we may get close to realizing the aspiration of partnership, it behoves us to remember that we are partners and servants, as I have tried to remind generations of trainees. At root, we are all waiters and waitresses really – however much we may not like to admit it. There’s one thing, though, which transforms the client-agency relationship, and that is actually liking your client. This sounds very trite, but, like many obvious