Special Issue Feature: Life Is Good

Geoff Cottrill, Converse’s CMO, remembers an uncomfortable dilemma he faced in a former job at Coca-Cola where he managed global marketing relations with Warner Brothers. Cottrill was set to fly to Europe to present a marketing plan to the creative force behind an upcoming studio blockbuster. Only one problem: The meeting turned out to be the same day Cottrill’s daughter was to begin kindergarten. Warner Brothers execs, upset by his request to move the meeting back a day, reluctantly agreed, and after Cottrill picked his daughter up from school, he boarded an overnight flight to Edinburgh. As his nervous partners at Warner Brothers watched the next day, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling sat next to Cottrill, tapped him on the knee and knowingly asked a parent whose child has just left the nest: “How you doing?”Cottrill’s experience may be a more dramatic unfolding of the challenges facing parents every day in the workplace, but it’s typical of anyone who musters the courage to stand up for the personal nonnegotiable in a professional world of trade-offs. The calibration of balance, of course, is a very personal one and something that shifts with changes in career objectives or personal circumstances. But given the dire economy, workplace demands have never been greater and the need to stay connected to those challenges never more easily met with all-consuming technology. Summer is a time to refresh and reflect on what matters outside the office, and now, toward the season’s end, AdweekMedia has checked in with industry execs to see how they make sure life pursuits are something more than a weekend sport.Unlike their parents’ generation, boomers like Cottrill refuse to be defined by their careers. “I have one life with lots of things in it. Travel is a fact of work life, and you have to make trade-offs,” he says. “But (at the Rowling meeting) I said, ‘I’m here as someone from Coca-Cola as well as someone who is a father. I don’t want to miss one of the most important days in my daughter’s life.’”Mother of two Lisa Caputo, Citigroup head of global marketing, easily moves between the worlds of finance and political commentary, possessing credentials as Hillary Clinton’s former press secretary. “‘Improve the balance’ implies that there’s an imbalance that needs to be fixed, that one’s life exists in these separate categories that can be weighed and measured as if on a scale,” she says. “I take the approach that work informs and enriches your personal life and vice versa.”Travel may be one of the more stressful challenges for working moms like Caputo, but men also say they find it tough to leave the kids. David Jones was named global chief of EuroRSCG in ’05 at 38; he was the father of one toddler with another baby on the way. Now with three children, and additional responsibility as CEO of Havas Worldwide, Jones estimates he flies nearly 19,000 miles a month. When his children see him packing his bag, they’ve grabbed his legs in protest. He tries not to set European meetings until Monday afternoon, rather than in the morning, so he can tuck his children into bed in New York before he leaves. “Maybe we all fly around too much,” he admits, but allows: “Still, there are instances where you have to be sitting in the meeting to influence the outcome, or if your clients or boss in Paris want to see you, you need to be there.”For Courtney Menzel, work travel is among the responsibilities that become even more of a juggling act when you’re a single mom with two kids. The evp, distribution at Current Media says she’s lucky to have a supportive ex who lives nearby to help and adds that working at family-friendly companies like Current and, before it, MTV, is a plus in the best of times and particularly so now. “You’re going to get more out of an employee if you’re respectful of their other life, and I don’t just mean children,” she says. “But it’s tougher right now. There are a lot of people out of work and looking and others who feel more nervous and dispensable, so it’s a situation where they might have to make trade-offs they don’t want to. Being a good parent also means being a good provider.”For David Churbuck, who until very recently was vp, global digital marketing at Lenovo, it was worth juggling long-haul trips to China and India with less time at home in order to have his children grow up as the sixth generation in the family’s Cape Cod home. Just don’t ask him to sit in traffic; he hates to commute. “It’s a tragic waste of time,” he says. “Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I’d become office bound. But it’s not relevant anymore. With technology, you don’t need to be there to manage and participate.”Living on the Cape also allows Churbuck to get up at 5:30 a.m. and indulge his passion for rowing. Indeed, early morning may be the last refuge for personal time in a connected world. Janet Riccio, the most senior female exec at Omnicom, is working out by 7:00 a.m. “I have to be in the gym four or five times a week,” she says. “It energizes me, clears my head and helps me organize the day ahead.” The evp says it’s also one of her cures for work-related jet lag. Within 24 hours of landing, she tries to be in a gym.R/GA founder Bob Greenberg won’t be without his yoga at 6:30 a.m., and he also has another early ritual: planning his day on paper using a fountain pen. The handwritten ink on paper provides a more personal transition to a digital work day.In Manhattan, Greenberg has always lived a few steps away from his offices. That real estate preference underscores the reality for executives at a certain level: The demands of work are never far away, regardless of their leaving the office.“It’s not about whether you work evenings or weekends. The work moves with you in your life. You’re always thinking about it,” says Susan Giannino, CEO Publicis USA. “I can become a little obsessive-compulsive if I have a work problem. But I’ve found if I do something else, that actually helps me solve the problem.”John Osborn, BBDO, NY president, CEO, remembers growing up as the only son to a single mom who often didn’t get home from work until 9:00 p.m. Helping to look after his younger sister, he developed a work ethic early in life. “I’ve always believed in working hard; it’s how I grew up,” he says. “When you’re put into a position of responsibility that young, you learn you have to earn what you get and hustle. Finding a balance is still elusive to me, particularly if you’re a perfectionist.” Osborn’s escape from work pressures are walks on a nature preserve near his Connecticut home with his black Lab Lucy, preferably without his BlackBerry.David Kohl, the evp, sales and customer operations at Vevo.com, a new music video and entertainment service, had no illusions about the 24/7 demands of a start-up since this is his third one. He says a typical workday can be 12, 14 or 18 hours in New York or on the road, a schedule those in his life understand. “If you like the dynamics of building something and watching it grow, I don’t think you’re giving anything up,” he says. “I’m completely fulfilled by that, and it spills over to family and friends who understand why I’m putting in so much time. They know people who are completely miserable in their jobs, and those people are only working eight hours a day.”Steve Luker also caught the entrepreneurial bug after working at founder-driven agencies like Wieden+Kennedy and Goodby Silverstein & Partners. One of three principals behind Mutt, an 18-month-old Portland, Ore., agency, Luker says a pleasant surprise has been carving out a work environment around the personalities who inhabit it. “There’s nothing that compares to the very unique, very personal thing that is the culture you’re trying to build,” he says. “We’ve got couches, and it’s casual. Family comes first—if people have to take a day off or bring kids into the office, it’s OK.”David Skokna, the global creative director at Huge, still cringes at the mention of the digital agency’s early days in his apartment where there was quite literally no separation between his professional and personal life. His ambitious young staffers are at a stage in their careers where they’re willing to make such trade-offs to build their reputations. “Time becomes artificial,” he says. “If they want to stay weekends and nights, it’s up to them. If they can achieve it and go home early, that’s fine too.”Only in that digital media world would a 28-year-old like Darren Herman, who is now chief digital media officer at Kirshenbaum Bond Senecal + Partners, consider himself one of the industry’s “older folks.” He enthuses about his new role as a dad, but says it’s changed his downtown lifestyle. There are still times when he says he misses the nights out where so much of the personal networking informed his professional life. “I still have a lot of friends without significant others, and they’re out all the time. They have a leg up on all the new hot stuff and sites before I see them.”Which is why, however successful an industry exec you are, you shouldn’t expect to have it all.“You’re never going to have balance. There will be trade-offs, but the point is not so much to live a balanced life as it is to live a full, rich life,” observes Publicis USA chief Giannino. “To do that you have to keep what’s important in perspective. You have to juggle and organize and always keep in mind what matters most to you.”For more of the Lifestyle Special Issue, click here.

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Special Issue Feature: Life Is Good

Noreen O'Leary

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Noreen O'Leary