Alex Bogusky interview in Fast company: the narcissism, the rancor, the cruelty

"He's a combination of believing something and being so good at selling it that you can't tell the difference between the two." --unnamed creative director

There's a long often flattering article at Fast Company about Alex Bogusky, talking to him about his future plans, the various startups all potential disrupters of the status quo, that he's involved in and even if all this is a mid-life crisis.

Toward the end of the article, the journalist Danielle Sachs calls up a few former CP+B people who have very few nice things to say. That's pretty much bound to happen.

While former Crispinites describe the experience as akin to everything from Harvard to Army boot camp, they all make it clear there was only one dictator -- Bogusky. "My beef with Alex is if you start disagreeing with him on something, he finds ways to humiliate you in front of people," says one former copywriter. He believes that Bogusky once canned the agency's best writer just to signal that "if he got fired, everyone else was expendable." When this copywriter tendered his own resignation, he claims Bogusky insulted him by saying he wasn't that talented, anyway -- a complaint I heard from several people who had resigned.

Of course, this business being the way it is, one of the sources emailed Sachs and said that "anybody named in [your article] is a dead man in the career of advertising". So get in there and see if you recognize anyone's quotes.