OMD CEO John Osborn: Allow yourself flexibility to explore opportunities

Subscribe: iTunes | Google Play | Stitcher | RSS | Anchor

I grew up with a single mom. She raised me and my younger sister. We were the original latch-key kids. My mom would work hard to put food on the table and a roof over our heads. We came home from school, prepared our own dinner, and it forced us to take on responsibility.

I started working even before the legal age. I painted houses and mowed lawns. I also went door to door to raise money to clean hazardous waste sites. Some people would close me out, but some people engaged with me, depending on how I approached it and placed myself in their shoes. These were tough neighborhoods. I am surprised someone didn’t throw me in the back of a car, and throw me in the fields outside of LaGuardia Airport and leave me there for the coyotes.

I got in advertising because Leo Burnett came to my college. I was in Dartmouth in Hanover, New Hampshire. They had companies come up to recruit. There was a presentation that was given by a representative with P&G, along with a person from Leo Burnett. They told a great story about how the two companies worked together to develop iconic advertising to move the business forward. I thought to myself, “If I take the art of making a case that I learned as a paralegal and combine it with the art of persuasion that I learned in Washington, here’s something you work hard and see as a physical manifestation of all that work in the form of an advertising campaign.”

I was probably way too rigid in a number of ways. In a simplistic sense, I was completely overscheduled. I’m also very Type A. I was able to get into routines where I would do things in a certain way. Days would turn into months and years, and I became so rigid that in retrospect, in a rare moment of solitude, I would reflect and say, “My gosh, so much time has gone by!” I didn’t view it as wasted time; I just viewed it as time where I could have been less rigid and allowed myself to dream, explore and think, “What if?”

One of the things I wish I knew earlier in my career was that I knew I wanted to be in advertising, but I was probably too rigid in that. I didn’t give myself any flexibility along the way. It’s one thing to have a destination in mind. You don’t want to be hell-bent on the destination, but you also want to enjoy the journey and explore if the opportunities present themselves.

I didn’t develop that sense of looking beyond my day-to-day job until a lot later in my career. If I had that self-awareness and was less hell-bent on what the next rung on the corporate ladder was, I would have gotten involved in some stuff in my career earlier.