Will, John, Ross and Scott

No, they’re not the latest boy band. In fact, they’re all regional bosses that I’ve met in the past 14 years. Three are gone and the last one might take on a possibly larger global role. Will retired, John was eased out by the new owner, Ross was fired and Scott is being groomed as a future successor. They’re worth writing about not only because their leadership and communication styles are studies in contrast. We absorb valuable insight simply by people watching. Emulate what works and discard what doesn’t.

Dale Carnegie, guru of How to Win Friends and Influence People, once said,   “There are four ways, and only four ways, in which we have contact with the world. We are evaluated and classified by these four contacts: what we do, how we look, what we say, and how we say it.” By coincidence or maybe not, the career trajectory of these four could be predicted by the way they made contact: upward with their superiors, sideward with their peers, downward with their staff, and outward with the clients and other external publics.

Will The Wit

He was a year away from retirement when we first met. Will was a walking irony. Dapper in a sharply tailored Italian suit, he would match it with a wildly colored, polka-dotted necktie. A Brit with a sunny disposition and a jovial face reminiscent of Benny Hill, most of the time he was very proper and tight-lipped, with a boarding school accent and royal manners. But we soon found out that he could make a living as a standup comic. His one-liners could crack anyone up. When he first met me, he chuckled, “Hmm, young, beautiful and successful … ____ would surely hate you!” I soon found out he was warning me about the female HK CEO who was the self-proclaimed belle of the ball in the region. Forewarned, I made sure she knew I had no intention of wresting her position away. When Will met our CFO Bong Liwag, he said to him, “Are you sure you’re a finance director? You look more like a matinee idol.” Once when he was in Manila he noticed the little Kia police cars. He drolly asked, “Are you sure that little car can outrun a thief on foot?”

Will was always so disarming that we rarely encountered irate clients. The one time we had a poor evaluation, he dismissed it as a “lapse of judgment” ... on the client’s part. A few dinners later, the client was singing the praises of the agency once again, unconditionally placated. I asked him why he was retiring at 65 years, when his boss, who was already 78 years old at that time, showed no signs of slowing down and pronounced his intention to rule till he turned 100. “I want to be Grey’s youngest retiree,” Will deadpanned. “Advertising is a young man’s game. Even the young-at-heart won’t be able to take what lies ahead.” This was Will’s cryptic prophecy in 1995. At that time, media independents were gaining ground only in key European cities, and TV networks were not posturing as creative agencies.

Will was an excellent communicator. He brandished humor like a weapon: to win over, defuse, pacify, and compliment. Even his rare disparagement was so clever you’d still be laughing after you realized you’d been hit by a smart bomb. From Will I learned not to sweat the small stuff. Even big setbacks sting less with a pinch of the comic.

John The Visionary

In many ways, John was the opposite of Will. Where Will was debonair and urbane, John was awkward and rumpled. He was forever in bad-fitting suits because of yo-yo dieting. Even when he was ordered by the doctor to lose the weight permanently or he could die, he would still inflate and deflate every other year. Where Will was an accomplished communicator, John often stuttered and literally talked from the side of his mouth, using homespun aphorisms that only he understood. Where Will was scintillating, John was nondescript. A colleague once whispered that John could blend in anywhere; he could even be CIA!

But John had vision, where Will only had comedy. In 1995, even before the Hong Kong turnover, John began elaborate plans for a China agency. He also designed a regional plantilla that tripled the people and resources in the Asia Pacific. John tried to strengthen the ASEAN offices and started a more methodical system of reporting and training. He streamlined operations that were not making money and put satellite offices in Vietnam and other major cities of India. But in 1998, the region felt the full brunt of the Asian crisis. John was transferred back to the home office, generally considered a failure. His vision, which was sound in theory, succumbed to financial duress. 

Back in New York, his career downturn and prostate cancer made it impossible for John to thrive. When WPP finally bought Grey in 2005, John was one of the first to be forced out.

Ross The Boor

After John’s less-than-sterling performance, we were sent Ross, touted as the miracle man who turned around the failing Latin American offices. The grapevine was abuzz with gossip about Ross, who was supposedly the fair-haired boy handpicked by the global CEO, no less.

Ross made himself up to look like a maverick. In his mind he was Richard Branson and Bill Gates rolled into one. Younger by Grey standards, he towered at 6’6” and kept his wavy hair long and unkempt like Weird Al Yankovic. He walked with a swagger, with his necktie permanently askew, as though this was a fashion statement. When he wasn’t calling everyone “mi cara,” his vocabulary was bursting with expletives and Spanglish! He intimidated and bulldozed anyone who got in the way. And he did this with a flourish, preferably within everyone’s hearing. Woe was the subordinate who dared to challenge him or did not perform up to his expectations.

Within a few months, Ross had unraveled everything and everyone that his predecessor had put together. He fired about 80 percent of the regional team that John installed. He also changed about 60 percent of the managing directors in the region and wove a magic financial report that highlighted his claimed accomplishments. By his second year, Ross was busy quashing rebellions. The entire Thailand office resigned en masse in sympathy with their MD, who was forced to resign.

One by one, Ross dueled with the MDs, the clients, the staff. He told Grey’s biggest client what a stupid idea he had. The regional office was toxic with falsely made-up profit reports and harangues from Ross. He even produced a sleek and expensive new-biz brochure that was full of quotable quotes ... from himself. We wondered when headquarters would finally concede that they had sent a bull to the china shop.

Just when the region was ready to spit out Ross, New York announced that he was so out. Apparently, two global clients had had enough and threatened to pull out their business if Ross continued to service the region. In the end, New York must have said, “Hola! Tu es fired!”

Scott The Diplomat

The crystal ball predicts that Scott will go very far and he will soon be given a bigger global role. After so much trial and error, there’s finally a regional boss who combines the strengths of Will and John, without the bile of Ross. He has the right balance of long-term and short-term priorities, leading and managing with both foresight and urgency. A man who chooses his words with care, the clients respect and admire him. So do we.