A few weeks after the Carlsberg and Mövenpick wins, I received a call from the editor-in-chief of Blick, German-speaking Switzerland’s largest newspaper. Whether Simko would like to participate in a pitch for their business. Hell yes, I said, and enthusiastically put together a Swiss-German creative team to support the effort. The Blick pitch was a big deal, with six agencies presenting, as usual all of them Swiss German, except for Simko.

We came up with an idea based on technology—we found a way to create, print and paste posters throughout all of the Swiss German cantons within a timespan of six hours. This meant that we could advertise the headlines and main themes for the current day’s Blick edition and people would see them in the early hours of the morning, on their way to work, inciting them to buy the newspaper.

In the time before widespread availability of news on the internet, it was a completely new way to advertise and the client was hugely impressed. He checked himself with the poster company and the printer, and they both certified that the system would work. A few days later, I received a call from the editor-in-chief saying that we had won the business. There was, however, a formality to take care of: for good order’s sake, I had to present our campaign to the owner of the Blick, one of Switzerland’s best-known editors.

On the day of my presentation, I sensed that something wasn’t right. The owner was half an hour late for a meeting that was meant to last for 45 minutes. As soon as he arrived, he said to me that I had only had ten minutes to ‘tell my story’. There were five other people accompanying him, of whom I only knew one, the Blick editor-in-chief, who looked subdued and said nothing during the ten minutes that I was allowed to speak.

A few days after my presentation, I received a short letter signed by the owner, saying that he thanked Simko for its work, but that another agency had been chosen. It took me a while to connect with the editor-in-chief, who initially wouldn’t come to the phone. When I finally caught up with him, he explained that the owner said to him that he would never allow an agency based in the French-speaking part of Switzerland to do the advertising for the largest Swiss German newspaper, no matter how good their ideas were. It was a lesson I wouldn’t forget: it’s not just ideas, insights and competence that make you succeed in business, you also need a deep understanding of how your audience (in this case, the owner as ultimate decision-maker) views the world. In retrospect, we should have never participated in the Blick pitch, we had zero chances of winning.

The Blick campaign from the agency that was chosen did not do well and about six months after our presentation, I received a call from the editor-in-chief. He wanted to know if we could sell to them the campaign we had created. They were prepared to pay a hefty sum for it. ‘No,’ I said, ‘we won’t sell you our campaign.’ He called back a few days later with an offer that was twice the initial amount. It was a lot of money. ‘No,’ I said again. ‘And please don’t call back.’

Many years later, when the same editor-in-chief was in charge of Switzerland’s most important business magazine, and we had become, to the surprise of all, Switzerland’s second largest advertising agency, he ran a major interview with me, titled: ‘Switzerland’s advertising guru’. The subtitle was: ‘Guts and ethics was the formula that helped Simko build a massive business.’

In spite of the Blick loss (or perhaps because of it), word started to spread about me, and one day I received a call from the secretary of Egon Zehnder, asking me if I would have time to have lunch with her boss and Lukas Mühlemann.

Egon Zehnder was the mythical founder of a multinational empire, the inventor of headhunting, and one of Switzerland’s best known and most respected businessmen. Lukas Mühlemann, at the time the CEO of Credit Suisse, was Switzerland’s most celebrated CEO. He sat on several key boards, including Swissair.

During lunch at the very exclusive Baur au Lac, Egon and Lukas asked me if I would take charge of the Harvard Club in the western part of Switzerland. Egon had founded the club in Zurich in the 1960s and Lukas was at the time the Chairman. In the 1970s, a second location for the club had been created in Geneva, to take care of activities in the French-speaking part of Switzerland.

It was a very big honour, but I hesitated and they sensed it. I was worried about the time it would take, and said that I would think about it.

A few days later I called Lukas and said that I would accept on three conditions: his team at Credit Suisse would be in charge of sending out all invitations (in the time before emails, the invitations were printed and sent by post), I would run the club as a dictator (in other words, I didn’t want to be surrounded by a committee, for which I had no time), and I wanted Lukas to come to Geneva and give a speech to club members. Lukas laughed, agreed and over the following years delivered on what he had promised.

I ran the Harvard Club in Geneva for the following ten years. It was a big success. Almost every event (mostly lunches, but also evening get-togethers and a few excursions) was completely booked out. After a while, I was able to invite many famous people to come and speak to us, including Sadruddin Aga Khan, Juan Antonio Samaranch (the head of the International Olympic Committee), Sepp Blatter (the head of FIFA), Boutros Boutros Ghali (the UN Secretary General), Claude Nobs (founder of the Montreux Jazz Festival) and Klaus Schwab (the founder of the World Economic Forum). I also regularly met with Harvard professors and once a year had dinner with the Dean of Harvard Business School, who would make a stop in Geneva on his way to the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos.

When I wrote to Maurice Béjart, the great Swiss choreographer, asking him if he would agree to speak to the members of the Harvard Club, he responded that he would be delighted to do so, but that he was busy and would find it difficult to come to Geneva. Would we like to come and see him in Lausanne? ‘Yes,’ I said, and on a Thursday evening, 150 of us watched, spellbound, the great Béjart choreograph his troupe, followed by an hour-long chat with him about his long career, and how the world of modern dance had evolved in the half-century since he started work in his profession.

At the end of the presentation, I offered him a small present. Instead of giving speakers a bottle of wine or similar, which was at the time the common practice in Switzerland for people addressing conferences, I had taken the habit of offering speakers a gift that was more personal, something more in line with their activity. In the case of Béjart, I had bought at a flea market a book published in the late 1940s about ‘new trends’ in modern dance. When Béjart opened the present, he stood up and hugged me. His eyes grew moist and he said: ‘What an amazing gift, I’ve been waiting for decades to lay my hand on this book. Look,’ he said, ‘here, on page 35, it’s the first mention of me in print.’ He then read to me the paragraph, which singled him out as the most promising representative of the new group of post-war choreographers. I received a wonderful letter from him a few days later and an invitation to see his ballet in Lausanne, followed by a dinner with him. It was an unforgettable evening.