Full Moon

The face of the man on the moon looks quite clear, keeping a watch over us as we build our rockets to reach him. But that face, so clearly defined from 230,000 miles away, looks nothing like a human countenance as we get closer. The features turn out to be nothing more than rocky promontories, ridges, boulders, and the residual dust of an inhospitable host.

From a distance some business leaders appear remarkably charismatic. Then as you get closer, you see things that maybe aren’t so charming.

Joe McIntyre owned the medical ad agency where I worked in Chicago. He cut a wide swath through business jungles and it wasn’t only because of his prodigious belly. An ever-present pair of suspenders whose contour resembled a pair of parentheses framed Joe’s girth. He seemed larger than life with his outspoken opinions, quick reads of situations and people, and sense of humor that caught everybody off guard even when we thought we saw it coming.

Joe was a Chicago ad man born of advertising’s golden era—the 60’s.  Full of bluster, clichés and a brass set that would qualify for enshrinement in the Balls of Fame.

He was Irish through and through, from the oil painting of JFK proudly displayed in his corner office, to the legendary weekend Winnebago trips he orchestrated with clients to attend the football games of his beloved alma mater, Notre Dame. Joe was the business incarnation of the Fightin’ Irish spirit, a smash mouth adman sans helmet and pads. Joe was our Gipper.

He had that unassailable gift of blarney that somehow allowed him to say shocking things and get away with it; more than get away, he’d get ahead.

I once sat in a conference room with him as a prospective new client came to check out our agency, to see if we were good enough for their company to include in an upcoming competitive pitch for their business. In the course of our capability presentation, Joe peppered them with questions about their product and company. Some of the questions caught them off guard and they fumbled the answers. Sensing blood in the water, Joe pounced, turned the meeting around and at one point proclaimed, “You guys are f---ed up. You don’t know what the f--- you’re doing with that product, do you?” He indicted their competence, and grilled them, as would a parent whose teenager violated curfew.

I didn’t have much experience at that point, but I was pretty sure one didn’t tell a prospective new client that they were f---ed up. Joe did. By the end of the meeting we had abandoned our presentation and Joe was lecturing on the opportunities they had blown and what we would do to try and get them back. To the shock of everybody except for Joe, we got hired without a competitive pitch.

He had a quick wit and an acid tongue to deliver it. On a business trip to Connecticut, a group of us sat at a table on the front porch of our hotel, having breakfast. There we were seated around the table eating when a colleague of ours came out late to join us. She was an account person, generally considered to be wound tight, very prim and proper, and reserved in manner and appearance. As she emerged out the door dressed in wrinkle-free black business attire, Joe looked up without batting an eye and loudly proclaimed, “Mary, you look like a defrocked priest.” Those of us chewing spewed food out of our mouths as we convulsed in the kind of laughter that only shock can inspire. It was wildly embarrassing for bewildered Mary, but Irish Catholic Joe couldn’t have cared less. It was funny because it was true, unexpected and outrageous.

Joe would do things others wouldn’t dare. At a very fancy restaurant during an industry convention, he held court with a group of chief executives from different companies. The restaurant was one where the magnificent wood-paneled walls were so elaborately crafted that you could barely see the bathroom door among them.  The small lavatory was separated from the dining room only by that wooden door.

At one point during the evening, things got tense between two CEOs who were arguing. It was souring the mood of the group, quickly turning ugly. Joe excused himself, got up from the table and went searching the walls for the bathroom door until he found it and entered, disappearing from view. The table grew quiet and uneasy as a gathering storm built, and according to a friend who was there, felt very much like a great night was on the verge of collapse. Just then the bathroom door swung open, revealing Joe seated upon the toilet, pants around his ankles, arm outstretched holding the door open. “Hey,” he shouted across the gaping dining room. “How about one of you assholes get me some toilet paper.” The image of him on the crapper in a roomful of well-heeled patrons brought the house down in laughter, and saved the evening.

Early in my career Joe showed a willingness to gamble when he unexpectedly placed in my unproven hands the responsibility of presenting a popular creative slide show to a new client we were pursuing. I accompanied him along with a cadre of division heads who were each going to present examples of their specialty. This was in the 1980’s, a decade before computers and Powerpoint presentations, when technology consisted of 35mm slides arrayed in carousel trays.

In my extreme anxiety over the sudden role in this important event, I realized as we got to the hotel in Delaware hundreds of miles away, that I did not have the tray of slides I was to present. I frantically called back to my New Jersey office where the tray was found, packed up and turned over to a delivery service with the request that it reach me at the client by the time I was to speak, around 9:00 in the morning. Joe snorted at my plan and bet me twenty dollars it would never reach us in time. Though he assured me that everybody makes mistakes, it felt like a lot more than twenty bucks was on the line.

The next day in a room filled with our team and the client’s stern corps, I sat watching as one of our speakers after another rose, delivered their canned talks, and sat down. As each finished, I felt closer to the edge of the plank. Another nail was driven into the coffin lid on my career.

Toward the end of the talk given by the fellow just before me on the agenda, there was a knock on the door and a secretary walked in with my package. Joe shouted out, “Son of a bitch!” and pushed himself away from the table, took out his wallet with a noisy flourish and slammed twenty dollars down on the table in front of everyone. I He seemed more irked over losing the bet than he was concerned about my screwing up the presentation.  But then he winked, letting me know all was forgiven thanks to that great eraser of mistakes: I got lucky.

Joe’s willingness to say and do exactly what he thought at the moment earned him legions of admirers and detractors. You loved him or hated him; no tepid waters flowed around this guy.

His company was at the root of a family tree that grew countless other agencies started by those schooled in his hard-driving atmosphere. He worked intensely, was a fierce competitor, and partied like a wild man.

At every company celebration, and there were many, loud music and dancing raged through the night. There on the dance floor, gyrating with women a third his age, was our profusely-sweating, red-faced leader, tirelessly shaking his Santa belly as he bumped and grinded his way to a frantic good time. Rumors were abundant about his bumping and grinding well after the parties ended. His age and girth may have been up there, but it didn’t seem to stop him. I never knew if there was truth to it or not, but considering the lack of restraint he showed with other urges, I don’t doubt it.

Joe did not observe boundaries that guide the rest of us. One time as a speaker at a large industry awards function, where everybody was feeling pretty good about how successful they all were, Joe stunned the room with a scathing ten minute attack against the audience’s smug, self-satisfied attitudes and lack of truly original ideas. He challenged everybody there to do better, and left a lot of his colleagues pissed off. Many thought he was crazy. He also got the attention of a number of potential clients who habitually wondered whether their ad agencies worked as hard for them as they should. Joe was about as crazy as a hungry fox.

It wasn’t just in front of microphones and bright lights that Joe crossed lines others would not. An art director named Tom told me how, early in his employ at the new East Coast office of the agency, he had unexpectedly met Joe.

Tom was seated one morning in one of the stalls in the men’s room, minding his own business, casually reading a newspaper when he heard somebody else enter the bathroom, and take a seat in the stall next to him. Tom pretended not to notice, trying to focus on his own matters. He jumped when suddenly a hand shot out from under the wall separating the stalls looking for a hand to shake, as a voice loudly proclaimed, “Hi, I’m Joe McIntyre. Who are you?” Tom wasn’t sure if Joe was just that friendly, or was letting him know he shouldn’t waste company time reading the paper in the bathroom.

I’m not sure of the psycho dynamics driving him, but it was apparent to all that what mattered to Joe was to matter. He simply couldn’t accept being a bystander in business, or in life. He had to be center stage, driving the action, making a statement by making a difference. Ego? Narcissism? Zest for life? All the above?

Whatever it was, Joe shined like the sun and kept everybody revolving around him. But like the sun, if you got too close, or spent too much time in it, you got burned. There is a long list of people in the business who thought they were heirs apparent to Joe’s kingdom, only to find the palace turned out to be made of cards. As good as the agency was, it was set up in divisions. Groups competed with one another for client relationships and budgets. The merger of interests took place only at the top, with Joe. So ultimately, the agency relied upon him.

Joe had proclaimed repeatedly over the years, “I’ll never sell.” He was referring to the increasing number of agencies whose founders were selling their companies to the growing behemoths of advertising, the multinational conglomerates. We thought he meant it. He certainly sounded sincere. After all, our agency was a Chicago success story in an industry dominated by East Coast firms. We were bigger than all but two agencies in the business, and marched to our own drumbeat. We loved competing against Madison Avenue, because we knew that our Michigan Avenue style of marketing smarts and hustle caught them off guard again and again.

So it took many of us by surprise when Joe announced that he had sold the agency to a large, multinational advertising conglomerate that owned a lot of Madison Avenue firms.  How would we fit into any corporate structure other than with Joe as our leader? Who else could we possibly follow? Who could inspire us the way he did?

Joe assured everybody that while he was transferring the ownership of the agency, he would remain at the helm, running the ship as always. In fact, he said, things would be better than ever because he wouldn’t have to spend time doing the administrative things an owner had to do that detracted from the hands on staff and client activities that he loved so much.

A lot of people believed him because they’d always believed him. His story made sense to those who couldn’t envision a future without Joe.

But you don’t sell your company when your goal is to spend more time running it. You sell it when you want to stop running it. No matter what you say publicly, that is what happens. And Joe knew it.

The corporate overlords to whom we now belonged had revenues so big our agency was merely one more drop in their Olympic-sized pool. The eccentricities of the man whose personality had built the shop were of no interest to them. In their eyes Joe was a mildly entertaining, mostly irritating fellow whom they neither wanted nor needed in their exclusive club. 

Joe knew this and his ego wouldn’t stand for their dismissive attitude.  It wasn’t enough that he had a lot of their money; he needed them to know they didn’t own him. He invited a couple of the executives from our new parent company to an annual industry boondoggle where he would take ten or twenty clients away for a couple days of mayhem. He wanted to show the executives that in our industry, he was The Man.

During a particularly heavy partying moment, the notoriously independent Joe demonstrated for his clients what he thought of having “bosses.” His exhibition of maverick-ness essentially involved mooning the corporate overlords, publicly and with much fanfare. Dropping his drawers and using his, he made Asses of the big guys from New York.

Whether by design or default, Joe was released from his contractual commitments to the purchasers of the agency within a few days.  Those who knew him best thought it was vintage Joe. A single act of outrageousness accomplished in a moment of raucous laughter what months of legal haggling would not. He had their money in his pocket, and didn’t let the door hit him as he exited.

What he left behind was a company not really prepared to run without him.  The wheels quickly came off without Joe’s presence. Supposedly capable lieutenants, who had privately extolled their achievements as the reason Joe was successful, didn’t handle things quite so capably when they were thrust into the hot seat of scrutiny.  Leadership, like pornography, proves that we are not all endowed equally. The fact is not everyone can get others to work for them.

Or even with them.

Clients who for years worked with the agency, didn’t hesitate to put their business up for review once the heads of the agency lost the stature and relationships to pick up the phone, call their bosses and get them put back in line.

Employees who never thought of leaving not only thought about it, they left. New agencies sprung up from the disgruntled and determined talents that at one time would never have dared quit Joe. Without Joe, they dared. We dared. I dared.

The agency that was considered Top of the Heap in the Second City quickly proved to be second rate. Within a year the client roster shrunk, the staff evaporated, and the once mighty agency became a minor cog in the great wheels of a big company that thought they were buying a galaxy of stars in the advertising sky, only to find they got mooned instead.