There's a lot of things that shape my story over the last 20 plus years and getting to where my responsibility is today in the world of advertising and marketing. I would tell you that probably one of the biggest influences over my life actually was when I was a little kid growing up. I grew up in Southern California and I have a great affinity for the Nike brand and during the 1984 Olympics, I was probably 19 years old, and during that games in L.A. in 84, Nike went from advertising sort of technical, functional things, to advertising with the heart and advertising with an emotion. So what you would see on the side of buildings were huge murals of an athlete and just a logo and for me, that was super cool. And at that point I realized as I look back, that was one of those key things that sort of helped me understand, Oh, man, if I ever get an opportunity to be in an environment where it's creative and where we have the sort of ability to shape the way people feel about something, I really wanted to be around that. I certainly didn't have that plan when I was 19 years old. I sort of stumbled upon it in many respects, going through university and then going to graduate school, getting my MBA. I spent the summer in between my first and second year at an advertising agency in upstate New York that gave me a little bit of a taste of it and since then, since I graduated and came out of my MBA, I've been in the advertising world since 1992 and it's been an awesome experience. I will tell you when people ask me that question about sort of what's my story? I tell them that I wake up pretty much every day excited about what I get to do because what we get to do is sort of create the way people feel about brands and to do it with a really deep understanding of consumers and how they're motivated, apply a lot of science and a lot of data to it, but also apply a lot of great storytelling as well. So to me, it's super fun, and since I couldn't find my way to writing the great American novel, I found my way into advertising. So I love it, it's a thrill every day and I know that it's a passion, and it's certainly a labor of love and I love it. Young people are starting to sort of finding their way to it in a different way lately through things like social media and a lot of different sort of peer to peer networking and a lot of the different types of platforms that people can create messages on, so it's been a long sort of story and getting here. My undergraduate degree was a little bit different, being an English major and going into business school but for me, it's always been about telling great stories, and it started when I was a little kid.

My responsibility in our office here in Dallas is to be responsible for the whole office on behalf of our client, which is Toyota Motor North America. The nature of my decisions varies through the balance of the day. Some days they could be completely about the out end product of creativity and media thinking and media planning and strategy around messages that are creating on behalf of the brand. Other days, it could easily be about budgets and headcount, the scope of work and how we're working with Toyota and the nature of our relationship, strengths, and weaknesses of people and making decisions about people's growth and career path in people. So as a whole host of responsibilities, I get the chance to do many things that's for me is still exciting, still getting a chance to be a part of the work that we put out, but also in the same respect, having a chance to grow people in the industry and to try to really focus a lot of my effort around how those things fit together and that's where I'll sort of pause and say for me when I think about a day, I think about that day in the context of what are we doing in our relationship with our clients and in our company to create a culture, a culture that feels like a place that people want to work, can be sticky while at the same time someplace that they can learn and grow. I talk a lot about creating a learning culture at Saatchi, I talk a lot about wanting to have the team within Saatchi subscribed to that notion of trying to grow their people so we spend a lot of time making decisions around that. I worked pretty much from anywhere, it's an interesting question, I work from the office or at home or in my car or on an airplane or in an airport all of those places when you are responsible in a partnership, in a relationship with the brand as large as Toyota, there's often very much a sense of responsibility all the time, and it's sort of a gift and a blessing to have that level of responsibility, and for me it's awesome, I find myself doing work constantly. I think the other thing that's true about that is how there's no time in the day when ideas can happen. It's not like you create a direction and you create a creative brief, and the result is between 10 to 4 p.m you're going to come up with great ideas. Great ideas can happen at any time, and we really do believe that so the result of that means that we're sort of always thinking about how to improve either the relationship or the work or the content that we're creating on behalf of the brands that we are responsible for in the world. It's a great question though.

Job titles in our industry are changing. In a classic agency organization, you have a creative group, a lot of folks in media and responsibility for media, there are folks in strategy and customer understanding or customer insight development, you have folks who are responsible for the relationship tend to fall in the world of account management. Folks on the client side are in the world of marketing managers, general managers of marketing, vice presidents of marketing, chief marketing officers, group vice presidents, CEOs. My responsibility is all of those so at any level in a corporate hierarchy or in our organization, I work with people throughout all levels. When you ask the question, what approaches do you find to be effective? I tend to land in a world where the most important and the most powerful way to connect with people is, to be honest, to be humble, to be transparent and to tell people when they do a good job that they do that they're doing a great job, and if they're not meeting your expectations find a way to do that in a constructive way so they are empowered and excited about trying to get better. Like I said before, as it relates to culture for us it's all about creating a learning culture, and we want people to grow. So the way I work with people is to try to find a way to make them feel that in their daily work, what are they doing to make themselves better? What are they doing in making themselves better? So for me, it's about honesty, transparency, humility has a big factor in it as well.