• by John Gaffney , June 18, 2002

Useful Executive Quotes Part I: I’m going to leave some of the names out of this. But recently a friend of mine assigned her new baby one of those first names where you say: “Oh, what a neat name.” Where I come from, you had to take your name to the playground. So most parents stuck with the names of saints and kept it to one syllable. In the same way that you take your name to the playground, I believe management follows you to a sales call. So if you’re working at Viacom and you’re selling ads, maybe you get into the casual distraction of “Hey do Sumner and Mel really hate each other?” But that’s not much of an obstacle. When a guy like Redstone uses the occasion of a personal award to tell the world how bullish he is on his company, I’d say your management is helping you make the sale. “The second quarter will be up for the first time in a long time. As the economy improves, the third quarter will be good and the fourth quarter will be more than good," Redstone said at the International Advertising Festival in Cannes yesterday. Pretty ballsy for a guy who gets held accountable for “forward looking statements.”

Useful Executive Quotes, Flipside: And then there’s Ted Turner. Now, I know Sumner and Ted are cut from different cloth, but at the end of the day your management needs to help you out, don’t you think? Especially when the rest of your management is either new to their gigs (like Parsons) or rumored to be heading elsewhere (Pittman). AOL vice chairman Turner took the occasion of an interview with UK’s The Guardian to size up the Mideast. In the process he included Israel in the discussion of terrorist states. “I would make a case that both sides (Israel and Palestine) are involved in terrorism,” he said. If you work at CNN you’re taking that to work this week. Ted, of course has a right to his opinion. But I don’t think his opinion is supporting his employees, much less his company.

A Very Venti Account: I may be wrong, but I believe Fallon New York’s forthcoming ad campaign for Starbucks bottled coffee drinks will be the first time anything with the Starbucks brand (including stores) has been aggressively advertised. Interesting to see whether the success of this campaign will lead to more Starbucks branding efforts.