In 2010, just before Christmas, my Assistant came to see me. We had an excellent and very open working relationship, and she was always quite frank with me about anything she noticed in the office that might be relevant to me or to my work. ‘I’ve been looking at your appointments over the past few months,’ she said. ‘About 50% of them are related to people needing help with interpersonal issues, either on the job or privately. The trend is increasing. I’m not sure how you want to spend your days, but perhaps you should consider reducing the time you devote to this area, so you have more time for clients or strategic issues. Or, perhaps, you’d like to write down some of your thinking—you’ve helped me several times with my own issues, and your counsel worked very well for me!’

I took her comment to heart and that year, during Christmas, wrote Happy at Work. Every morning, while you were still asleep, I wrote a chapter. After 15 days, I was done. The last day, before returning to the office, I re-read the manuscript and wrote a preface. Then I put the text aside and didn’t look at it again for several years.

Then in early 2015, while I was putting some order into old files on my computer, Happy at Work popped up. I skimmed through it, then stopped and read the chapter ‘Is this the right job for me?’, followed by the chapter ‘Living in the Now’. Then I said to you: ‘I’m resigning from Publicis.’

You were not entirely surprised, but still you asked me to think it over. Pablito and Nico, who I contacted that morning, were startled. One of them said: ‘But Dad, why are you doing this? You have an important job, in a very well-known company, you’re paid a lot of money and the job allows you and Evelyn to travel and spend lots of time together. You are close to 60, don’t you just want to hang on for a few more years?’

No, I didn’t want to hang on a minute longer. I didn’t like my boss and I knew that he would run Publicis one day. I didn’t like the Publicis culture. And I thought that most of our clients’ complaints were justified—the work we were doing was not good enough, but I was receiving insufficient resources from the company to change things in any fundamental way. 

So, on a snowy Saturday morning in January 2015, I wrote an email to my boss and said that I was quitting. Subsequent meetings with him did not change my determination and I just left. 

I had no specific plan, but I thought that something would work out, and it did: I spent the next six years doing consulting work. I helped many clients, mostly large global corporations, to find their way with advertising agencies. It was something that was easy for me and which I enjoyed tremendously. Most clients became friends. To my astonishment, many of them loved Happy at Work, which I self-published with the invaluable help of Eric Olson’s daughter Loren and her very gifted partner, Steven Sarkozy. Many of my clients distributed Happy at Work widely within their organisations. Despite zero marketing efforts on my part, the book sold quite well on Amazon and I’ve been startled to regularly read reviews from perfect strangers, all of them giving me high marks for the insights the book has provided to them.

During my years as a consultant, you and I travelled as much as we wished, and, as in the past, we put the priority on what was the most important to us: lots and lots of time together. I worked mostly in the mornings, then you and I would have a very leisurely lunch. My afternoons and evenings have been for us, filled by cooking, reading, watching movies and our long conversations.

When I told my clients that I would stop working, most of them were in disbelief. One took me to lunch and asked, with a concerned look, if I was ill. ‘Why are you stopping? Are we not paying you enough? You know, we can discuss your fees,’ another client said. ‘I want to read books, spend time with Evelyn, travel and cook,’ I would respond. ‘But you’re already doing all of that,’ I would hear people say.

I was never able to do things halfway, which is why stopping work was the only way for me to devote my time (or rather, all of it) to doing the things I love, including writing this letter to you. Being active in business and accumulating wealth have been things that I’ve done reasonably well, but they were never at the centre of my life. I’ve always seen them as amusing pastimes, but nothing that would signal to others who I am or what I would like to be remembered for.