What I learned from reading The Man Who Sold America: The Amazing (but True!) Story of Albert D. Lasker and the Creation of the Advertising Century by Jeffrey L. Cruikshank and Arthur W. Schultz.
Who was this Albert Lasker whose energy and imagination ran in so many directions at once and who was, in his own words, driven by a thousand devils?
His friends considered him charming, brilliant, thrilling and exhausting.
His subordinates admired him enormously and dreaded his arrival at the office and the tumult that inevitably ensued.
Clients quickly learned that there was no such thing as a half embrace of or by Albert Lasker.
He pursued life with a fervor that offended and alienated many people.
A lot of people can't stand me, he once admitted, because they think I'm too aggressive and too dynamic.
Little men, to use his terminology, were driven off by it.
Big men, such as RCAs David Sarnoff and american tobacco's George Washington Hill drew energy from it.
They looked forward to fighting with Lasker.
They learned from him, too.
He's the only man I felt I'd like to murder every now and then.
Herbert Field confessed, almost 20 years after being pushed out of his senior position at the advertising agency, then adding, there isn't a finer man living.
I'd like to kick him in the back, said a former associate who left under duress but then added, I've never met a man as colorful and viral and as personable as Mister Albert Lasker.
Never.
Lasker's energy and passion infused both his personal and professional lives, and sometimes those two lives converged.
One Monday morning in 1939, his top lieutenants gathered for their weekly state of the agency meeting.
This was no ordinary Monday, however.
It was the first meeting after the very public unraveling of Lasker's second marriage, a disastrous union with a Hollywood starlet that fell apart even before their honeymoon ended.
Everyone in the room knew all the salacious details.
All were eager to see how the boss would handle the situation.