I just spent a wonderful couple of hours with George Lois. George is an advertising legend and is rumored to be one of the inspirations for Don Draper (in a purely proffessional way, not a moral one!)
Edelman is promoting his current book, Damn Good Advice, and he spoke to a group of us here in the office today about his life, his work and the book.
The book is a collection of 120 rules for “unleashing creative potential,” and many are as brash and uncensored as George himself is. Some of my favorites…
#19: You can be Cautious or you can be Creative (but there’s no such thing as a Cautious Creative)
#43: Tell the Devil’s Advocate in the room to go to Hell
#58: If you think people are dumb you’ll spend a lifetime doing dumb work
#104: Learn to write one singular, coherent, informative, insightful, spectacular sentence to replace your illiterate off-the-cuff twittering!
Here is a pic of George presenting, showing one of his iconic campaigns. Yeah, he did that…
Oh, and he designed Esquire covers for years as well, including this famous one…
And here’s me giving career advice to George…not really…
