‘Let me tell you when I might demand that you take my name off the door. That will be the day when you spend more time trying to make money and less time making advertising – our kind of advertising. * When you forget that the sheer fun of ad-making and the lift you get out of it – the creative climate of the place – should be as important as money to the very special breed of writers and artists and business professionals who compose this company of ours – and make it tick. * When you lose that restless feeling that nothing you do is ever quite good enough. * When you lose your itch to do the job well for its own sake – regardless of the client, or the money, or the effort it takes. * When you lose your passion for thoroughness…your hatred of loose ends. * When you stop reaching for the manner, the overtones, the marriage of words and pictures that produces the fresh, the memorable, and the believable effect. * When you stop rededicating yourselves every day to the idea that better advertising is what the Leo Burnett Company is all about. * When you are no longer what Thoreau called ‘a corporation with a conscience’ – which means to me, a corporation of conscientious men and women. * When you begin to compromise your integrity – which has always been the heart’s blood – the very guts of this agency. * When you stoop to convenient expediency and rationalize yourself into acts of opportunism – for the sake of a fast buck. * When you show the slightest sign of crudeness, inappropriateness or smart-aleckness – and you lose that subtle sense of the fitness of things. * When your main interest becomes a matter of size just to be big – rather than good, hard, wonderful work. * When your outlook narrows down to the number of windows – from zero to five – in the walls of your office. * When you lose your humility and become big-shot wisenheimers…a little too big for your boots. * When the apples come down to being just apples for eating (or for polishing) – no longer a part of our tone – our personality. * When you disapprove of something, and start tearing the hell out of the man who did it rather than the work itself. * When you stop building on strong and vital ideas, and start a routine production line. * When you start believing that, in the interest of efficiency, a creative spirit and the urge to create can be delegated and administered, and forget that they can only be nurtured, stimulated and inspired. * When you start giving lip service to this being a ‘creative agency’ and stop really being one. * Finally, when you lose your respect for the lonely man – the man at his typewriter or his drawing board or behind his camera or just scribbling notes with one of our big black pencils – or working all night on a media plan. * When you forget that the lonely man – and thank God for him – has made the agency we now have – possible. * When you forget he’s the man who, because he is reaching harder, sometimes actually gets hold of – for a moment – one of those hot, unreachable stars.

THAT, boys and girls, is when I shall insist you take my name off the door.’

Leo Burnett, December 1, 1967