An Afternoon with George Lois

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...