Success Quote by David Ogilvy

Ogilvy is doing something sly here: he flatters genius by insulting it, and he protects the difficult people by reducing them to a business asset. “Very few” establishes scarcity, the oldest persuasive trick in commerce, then he swivels the lens onto the agency itself: advertising doesn’t naturally incubate genius. It hires it reluctantly, often after sanding off the edges. Ogilvy’s warning is that the sanding is the loss.

The key move is the word “disagreeable.” He’s not romanticizing temperamental artists; he’s naming the office reality everyone recognizes - the blunt critic in meetings, the person who won’t “align,” the one who’d rather be right than liked. In a culture built on client service and internal harmony, disagreeableness is usually treated as a management problem. Ogilvy reframes it as a symptom of value: the same person who creates original work is often the one who refuses the polite compromises that make work safely average.

“Don’t destroy them” hints at the quiet violence of corporate life: committees, process, forced consensus, performance reviews that punish friction. The closing fable - “They lay golden eggs” - is bluntly utilitarian. It’s not “respect their creativity”; it’s “they make money.” That’s classic Ogilvy: hard-nosed about commerce while still arguing for craft.

Context matters: mid-century agencies were professionalizing, scaling, and selling reliability to big clients. Ogilvy, building an empire on effectiveness, knew the paradox: the work that wins attention is made by people who are hard to manage. The line is a memo to executives: tolerate the thorn, or you’ll end up with a garden of plastic flowers.