Filling in the blanks. Part 2
Bogusky also never told me about how he might come to terms with the fact that he’d created a workplace that was, for many people, nothing short of miserable. Crispin is still known as a sweatshop, with former employees often saying that while they were proud of the volume of work they did there, it was unsustainable. This is something the company practically prides itself on. Nadal, the CEO of parent company MDC, told me, “Alex created a culture of animals who work maniacally. Everyone at Crispin wanted to serve Alex, and Alex keeps the bar so high, he is a perfectionist. So everyone is trying to outdo him, which is impossible.” While former Crispinites describe the experience as akin to everything from Harvard to Army boot camp, they all make it clear there was only one dictator—Bogusky. “My beef with Alex is if you start disagreeing with him on something, he finds ways to humiliate you in front of people,” says one former copywriter. He believes that Bogusky once canned the agency’s best writer just to signal that “if he got fired, everyone else was expendable.” (Bill Wright, Tom Adams, Rob Reilly, Bob Cianfrone, Dave Schiff, Rob Strasberg and Ari Merkin are the agency's all time best copywriters. I find these fictitious stories more amusing when they aren't dignified with ink in FC.) When this copywriter tendered his own resignation, he claims Bogusky insulted him by saying he wasn’t that talented, anyway —a complaint I heard from several people who had resigned. Crispin offers what seem like luxurious perks—an “extreme concierge” who fixes motorcycles and snowboards, for example—but these goodies came to be seen as ways to handcuff employees to their desks. There was even a feeling among staffers that the many Crispin marriages that occurred were a result of the intense pressure— after all, it wasn’t as if you had time to meet anyone working somewhere else. “I woke up on Valentine’s Day and told my girlfriend, ‘I’ll quit, that’s my gift to you,’ ” says former Crispin art director Colin Kim, who is now married to the woman (not a Crispin employee). “Sometimes you have to say, Alex is not going to give me a baby, Alex is not going to marry me.” (I'm impressed with Colin here for several reasons. He uses his name and stands behind what he says. He also chose his wife over Crispin. Smart move.) Nor did Bogusky mention how selfishly he handled Crispin’s move to Boulder. According to former employees, he gave the staff, and even his three partners, little forewarning or explanation. One day, in the fall of 2005, he called the creative talent into his office and tearily announced the cross-country departure. “He was crying and sobbing, saying, ‘I just need you guys to support me on this. We’re going to Boulder. I’m moving the agency to Boulder,’ ” recalls one copywriter. “That was like a bomb dropping,” recalls Colin Drummond, Crispin’s former VP and director of cultural and business insights. “People were mad at him.” Chuck Porter publicly reassured the staff that there was no pressure to move, but says one former Crispin executive, “Alex made it clear: If you wanted to work at Crispin in the creative department, you had to move to the Boulder office. To make matters worse, many employees had to move to move on their own dime. (Danielle, You know that when I decided to move I offered to just go into semi-retirement and move with just an assistant. But the partners all decided on a different course. We ultimately moved with 40 people who decided they would rather be in Boulder than Miami. We all told people they could be anywhere they wanted to be. Today there are almost 600 people working in Boulder because that's where they want to live. But Miami has always had creatives and I helped recruit Ari Merkin back to Miami. You know all this stuff, Danielle.) “He’s a bit of a Chance the Gardener,” explains one of Bogusky’s Boulder friends. “He had the rare opportunity that not many people in the world get to do, which is to do pretty well by being yourself. The problem is that after awhile you start believing the hype while people around you start getting tired of it. It’s too self-absorbed. It’s all about Bogusky.” That reference to the blank slate at the center of Being There is the kindest comparison anyone offers, and Bogusky being Bogusky, I am offered many: He’s Citizen Kane (“the most miserable rich guy”), Fidel Castro (“megalomaniac, sociopath, narcissist”), Caligula (“at the end of the Roman empire”), or Hannibal Lecter (“the handsome guy behind the Plexiglas”). (Really, Danielle? Business Week was able to talk to people for weeks and came up with completely different stuff. Oh, you have to excuse me while I get back to clubbing a baby seal.) After a week of all this, a week during which source after source begged me not to quote them by name (one emailed me that “anybody named in [your article] is a dead man in the career of advertising”), I knew it was time to call Bogusky back. I was starting to wonder if he had only shown me the man he wants to be, not the man he really is. “I pretty much love everybody,” Bogusky says when I call him back to ask about his detractors. “Or I at least like everybody. There’s no one I don’t really like—there are some people I barely like. It takes energy to dislike, I guess. So the lowest you can go is, I barely like you.” (This is true and it's a great way to roll. I still like you, Danielle.) I now understand this as quintessential Bogusky: charming, clever, disarming, and totally undermining. He does it again when talking about his indifference to folks who quit Crispin. “I know you want me to feel bad that you’re leaving,” he says, pretending that I’m one of the quitters. “I know this is a big deal for you, but in the context of what the rest of my week’s gonna be like, it’s just not a big deal. Everyone wants that to be a very special moment, but unfortunately it’s not.” And again when I tell him about those who feel he was the only voice in the room: “If someone thinks something’s great and I don’t, then it’s important that they have their own company.” Our conversation follows this general pattern. Criticisms that would wallop most people don’t even strike glancing blows. (True enough. There was a time when this stuff would break my heart but I realized eventually that you can't make all of the people happy all of the time. Maybe that's why it's a cliche.) He says he did what he did for the good of the corporation, that those who were able to rise to the challenge did breakthrough, entrepreneurial work. He chalks the criticisms up to legend, viewing them as tall tales of his persona. “I like hearing the stories,” he says. “At some point, if you can, tell me more of them.” I feel as if I’m hitting a wall. How can someone who wants to be on the side of fixing humanity, who claims to be so engulfed in self-examination, be so emotionally untouched by the views of others, of the very people who at one time were the human beings behind his machine? (It feels like Danielle is trying to equate making everybody like me with doing the right thing. It would be nice if they were the same thing, but at least in my experience they are not always the same. We worked to make a system of doing advertising that worked well for most folks but it wasn't the best place for everybody. Compassion is not just giving people what they want. That might have been part of Mother Teresa's point. But there are things I would do differently today. Like create a more transparent culture. But that is a huge challenge for agencies since they represent so many other companies that may not want that same level of transparency and open conversation. Somebody smarter than I am will figure that out.) Toward the end of our talk, I press to see if he feels any remorse. “Do I feel bad about how I’ve treated some of my employees in the past?” he responds, taking an uncharacteristically long pause. “I want to say yes, but I’m not feeling that.” I make another call, this time to a real shrink, Dr. Sylvia S. Welsh, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the New York University School of Medicine. I tell her of my time in Boulder, the vitriol of Bogusky’s former colleagues, and his astonishingly apathetic response. I ask her for a clinical description of narcissists. “Pathological narcissists really do disregard how their actions affect others. They don’t think or care about it,” she says. And what about sociopaths? I ask. “There’s one hallmark,” she explains. “They experience no remorse. They can do bad things and not have any guilt.” Veterans of the ad biz assume Bogusky is on a search for redemption. “Crispin sells cheap clothing and bad food. They sell junk,” one former employee tells me. “I think Alex is almost trying to atone by going on record saying things like ‘Plastic bottles are bad.’ ” An executive at another MDC agency put it more bluntly: “I think he’s doing his penance for selling shit all these years.” But that’s not how Bogusky sees it. “It’s not that I don’t think people should eat fast food,” he had rationalized to me. “They should eat whatever they want to eat. I just think the conversation about what’s in our food is kind of separate from that.” “My sense is he thinks it’s a big game,” a friend of Bogusky tells me. “He just likes playing the game. The game of life. If he finds something intriguing, he’s like, ‘I’m going to be the best in the world at it. I’m going to convince people to eat more fatty burgers, and I’m going to convince people to drive electric cars—because I can convince them of anything.’ ”Looking back, it’s clear that much of what Bogusky presented to me as part of his personal transformation—collaboration over competition, transparency over inscrutability, sustainability over excess—are the cornerstone issues of today’s most progressive businesses. These are big ideas, but they’re typically more the stuff of repositioning corporations than humans undertaking a gut-wrenching internal audit. There’s a video online (Here ya go http://vimeo.com/11503551) of a speech Bogusky made last April in San Francisco, at the Institute at the Golden Gate’s Turning the Tide conference. Bogusky sent me the link. In it, he unveils a new stump speech, in which the self-deprecating ad guy who has now seen the light offers his modest take on everything from the energy economy to the industrialized food supply. It’s riveting. It’s smart. In the background, his new audience—environmentalists, Nobel Laureates, scientists—sits rapt, under his spell. A former Bogusky employee who had also seen the video described it to me with awe and repulsion. “He’s in his organic sweater, his canteen water bottle held just perfectly in front of the camera. Alex has this amazing timing, knowing exactly when to take advantage of a cultural moment.” As this story went to press, Bogusky and I traded emails and phone calls about his abrupt resignation from MDC. The day the news broke, he couldn’t help but admire his own reflection. “The Twitterverse, it is crazy,” he told me. “Like 1,600 Bogusky mentions or something.” A blog post I wrote about the “divorce” made Nadal irate, but the controversy merely amused Bogusky. He tweeted of me and the MDC chief, “She is awesome. Miles is awesome. Now we should all take a nice nap.” A few days later, his Facebook profile was updated with a photo in which he sports a pair of gold wire-rimmed glasses, a look that put him somewhere between a philosophy professor and John Lennon. (My son bought me these antique glasses for fathers day and in fact, Danielle knows this too. But I guess I had no idea he was actually carefully manipulating my image. He is so grounded.) “He’s in perpetual optimization,” Nadal had once told me. “Every month, he has a new haircut, he changes his facial hair, his watch.” I was reminded of one creative director who described Bogusky this way: “He’s a combination of believing something and being so good at selling it that you can’t tell the difference between the two.” (Need to add some context here before the next paragraph. I was talking to Danielle about how environmental efforts have had trouble gaining traction. And perhaps part of the problem is that self sacrifice wasn't an idea many people were buying into. Perhaps a better path would be to illustrate how making great choices for yourself are also consistent with great choices for the planet. So my friend and I were playing with the idea of writing a book called, "The Narcissist's Guide to Saving the Planet." All this conversation that follows is Danielle taking that out of context. But context is important.) “I don’t think we’re good at being selfish,” Bogusky had mused to me on one of those idyllic Boulder mornings. “Most of humanity, we’re total rookies at being selfish and being narcissists. Because if you’re really good at narcissism, you get to the point where that rookie kind of selfish doesn’t even exist. A really excellent narcissist would be a really powerful tool for saving the planet. If everyone was a perfect narcissist, there would be nothing to worry about because we’d automatically fix everything and our purchases would be so benign. It’s not self-absorbed, it’s just knowing what’s good for self. Let’s say that steaks, scotch, and lots of cigars are what you put in your body—that’s a rookie-narcissistic move. That’s where we’re uneducated narcissists. But as we perfect our narcissism, it comes around where you’re actually doing things that feel like sharing, that feel like connected behavior. “I told my friend this theory, and he said, ‘You may be the most narcissistic person I know. It used to piss me off, and now I’ve come to be okay with it.’ ” Danielle Sacks 
