ABSTRACT
It was at McCann that my early training advanced a great leap because of another extraordinary fellow, one of my cherished mentors, Peter Kim. Soon after the disaster of the Coca-Cola loss, the CEO of McCann Erickson elected to bring in some new talent, starting with Peter as Worldwide Vice Chairman and Executive Director of Strategic Planning. Peter had been a wunderkind at J. Walter Thompson, becoming an Executive Vice President of Strategic Planning for the company in his late twenties. But that was nothing. Peter graduated college at eighteen, immediately entered the Ph.D. program, and was an instructor at New York University at nineteen! South Korean by birth and the son of an international South Korean businessman who emigrated to the United States, Peter came from a family of super achievers-his sister won a full scholarship to Julliard to study the piano at the age of nine-he was probably the greatest business winner I ever encountered. He believed
you win through the “crushing weight of logic.” Peter once told me, “You don’t have to be the biggest guy in the room to overwhelm.”
