From Mad Man to Happy Farmer

An Asset-Based Thinker’s look back at the lessons learned from a lifetime in marketing to help guide, motivate, and inspire the industry’s next generation of responsible leaders. A communications industry veteran, Hank Wasiak’s professional journey took him to and through the corporate boardrooms of the ad world’s biggest names. He learned from the best in the business to become the best in the business.

From the beginning Hank also made time for his second career, teaching marketing communications. He’s taught at six universities and been in the classroom with successive next generations of marketers for almost fifty years. For the past ten years, Hank has been an adjunct professor at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business.

In 2003, Hank was Vice Chairman of the world’s largest marketing communications company, McCann-Erickson. He was unexpectedly pushed into early retirement. Hank went on to partner with his son at Concept Farm, Ad Age’s Small Agency of the Year Winner. The move heralded his exit from a “had-to” career and his entree into the “want-to” work he had always longed for. At the Farm, Hank has been blessed with more meaningful work, productivity, personal fulfillment, determination, confidence, and humility than he could ever have imagined. This is his inspiring story of how he moved from the boardroom to the “barnyard,” what he learned about life and marketing along the way, and what he wants future marketers to know about the power and purpose of what they do.