Alan and I were the only two guys in the program that didn't have MBAs. We did two-month stints for a year in different advertising disciplines: Health and Beauty aids, Household Products, Sales Promotion, and so on. You worked on new business pitches or gathered information for them. We were housed in the Information Retrieval Center, which was really storage for magazines, reports, books and a new technology called Xerox machines. The general manager of the program was Hank Norman, a German-born American citizen with an Erich von Stroheim accent who scared the living crap out of everybody but Alan. Alan had just spent two years in the Army in Germany and thought Norman was funny. Turned out that Norman was a pussycat.
– James Kiewel, former
Executive Vice President, Siegel+Gale
