Why Asking Nicely Works Or How Coke Got A Bunch Of Free Publicity And Mad Men Got The Ending It Wanted

It's been my experience that when you want something - a discount, a favor, a deal - all you need to do is ask nicely. Obviously this isn’t applicable to all situations. High level deals don’t happen just because someone asked nicely and I’ll admit a certain degree of optimism (naïveté?) about peoples’ willingness to help. But in life and in business I have found this to be true more often than not

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How Does Mad Men Get Away With Publicly Badmouthing McCann Erickson?

Devotees of Mad Men, a.k.a. The Greatest TV Show Of All Time, will know what I mean by that headline. The show has never been shy about casting McCann Erickson, a real life ad agency, in an unsympathetic light. For years, McCann was the major rival for our struggling protagonists; in an earlier season, Don Draper, Roger Sterling, and Bert Cooper started their own agency just to get out from McCann's clutches. And now that McCann finally bought and dissolved SC&P this season, we get to see how unpleasant it is from the inside as our favorite ad men and women adapt to life there with great difficulty. But if you saw last week's episode and Joan's treatment at the hands of the lecherous Ferg Donnelly and cruel Jim Hobart, you know the show is no longer interested in treating McCann with cool indifference; McCann is now the villain. Full Stop.

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