Managing Creative People: Lessons in Leadership for the Ideas Economy

Chapter 1. The day the world ran out of ideas

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

—Opening lines of Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

Along with several million other people I was in Manhattan on Tuesday, September 11, 2001.

Ever since Friday evening, when my taxi dropped me off at the New York Palace Hotel in Madison Avenue, a small crowd of people, mostly young women, had been gathering on the kerb directly opposite the hotel entrance on 50th Street. They were bored and restless, as though they had been there for some time. A couple of NYPD officers hung around to make sure they respected the flimsy tape barrier that kept them away from the traffic.

My room on the 15th floor looked directly down onto the nave of St Patrick's Cathedral.

On Saturday night I was scheduled to meet up with an old friend from Mexico, whom I had met while working there as creative director of J. Walter Thompson in Mexico City.

The moment the elevator doors opened in the lobby I could hear the hysterical screaming of the crowd. I ran outside to see a white limo turning into the vast concrete cavern of the delivery garage. The police and several bodyguards were struggling to keep the crowd from streaming inside. A slight figure in an iridescent black suit was being hurried from the limo into the service elevator. I caught a glimpse of a single white glove.

'Wow,' I said to Chris when we met up at the Thai restaurant somewhere on the Upper West ...