any wednesday

            WHAT PICASSO SAW

"I'm told that, as a schoolboy, Picasso was a terrible math student.  When the teacher asked him to write the number '4' on the blackboard, Picasso saw it as a nose and began doodling to fill in the rest of the face.  Seeing the familiar in a fresh new way is at the heart of what we call 'creativity'."

SPLENDOR

"David Ogilvy and I were once discussing the pressures of the advertising business.  He shared a favorite quotation of his which has since become a favorite of mine.  It is an observation by St. Augustine, the first Archbishop of Canterbury:

To be under pressure is inescapable.  Pressure takes place through all the world: war, siege, the worries of state.  We all know men who grumble under these pressures, and complain.  They are cowards.  They lack splendor.  But there is another sort of man who is under the same pressure, but does not complain.  For it is the friction which polishes him.  It is pressure which refines and makes him noble.

May our men and women never lack for splendor and nobility under pressure.

            In 1980, Keith Reinhard began issuing a one-page weekly memo called Any Wednesday, primarily for his agency's staff.  He stole the title from a 1964 Broadway play, primarily because he thought that halfway through any given week, most of his peers would welcome a bit of good news or an encouraging word from whatever the source.  Sneakily, he also thought that by calling it "Any Wednesday" instead of "Every Wednesday", he could get by skipping a week or two.  In the name of discipline, however, Reinhard realized that if he skipped at all, he'd never stick to it.  So, with the exception of a brief pause in 1987, Any Wednesday has been published every Wednesday since 1980 (539 entries by the end of 1994).  What's most rewarding to him has been the weekly opportunity to pause and reflect on the continuing evolution of his industry and his agency, and to share the wisdom and inspiration of people he meets and works with.  All of them were written on lined paper, across the lines, to remind him and everybody who reads them of the advice a Spanish philosopher offered years ago:

"When they give you ruled paper, write the other way."

Juan Ramon Jimenez