• strategy + business, Friday, May 1, 2009 11:46 AM

The best advertisement David Ogilvy ever wrote may have been a house ad titled "How to Run an Advertising Agency," writes Ken Roman, the former chairman and CEO of Ogilvy & Mather, in an excerpt from "The King of Madison Avenue: David Ogilvy and the Making of Modern Advertising."

The "principles of management" that he wrote out for Ogilvy & Mather staff in 1968 apply more broadly than to advertising agencies. But it wasn't just what Ogilvy said about running a business that was special, Roman writes, it was how he said it.

Directors at a board meeting found Russian matryoshka dolls at their seats at one board meeting. Inside the tiniest doll was a message: "If you hire people who are smaller than you are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. If you hire people who are bigger than you are, we shall become a company of giants."

The glue that held the organization together was training, Roman says. Ogilvy took great teaching hospitals as his model. "We look after clients, and we teach young advertising people," he said. "Ogilvy & Mather is the teaching hospital of the advertising world."

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