IN SEARCH OF A PARTNER

This is not an easy discussion to have in a culture where pumping up stock prices each quarter has become a cardinal rule—and keeping wages down has been one of the cornerstones of that imperative. I want a partner to help spread this heretical message, and Ken is as good a chance for that as I’ll get. If you’re going to begin warning people that the sky is falling, it helps to have someone with authority at your side. He’s a test case for me, but also, Ken could open doors. He could persuade. I want to describe a crisis of inequality of opportunity that has grown out of business practices adopted for decades by most business leaders. It’s more than unfair. It doesn’t work. Will he recognize that?

I respect Ken. I wish he were running every company in America. His parents were blue collar, and he put in years of menial labor to see himself through Bucknell and NYU, and then he got into banking. In his early thirties, he handled the IPO for Ross Perot’s Electronic Data Systems and then became an angel investor who underwrote the founding of Home Depot. A good bet, as it turned out. He dotes on that $88 billion retailer. It’s his baby. You can Google his net worth if you want to know the reward he received for his instincts and hard work. He’s familiar to many people in business through his appearances on CNBC, Bloomberg, Fox, and other media portals. When he endorses a presidential candidate, Ken’s face appears on the Fox evening news.

I hear him honk outside. I head out and climb into his convertible, though the morning temperatures are unusually cold in Florida this year. By the time we arrive at his favorite dive, Harry and the Natives, I’ve pulled on my sweater, visibly shivering from the Atlantic chill. Ken probably thinks this is just another casual breakfast. I’m wondering if he’ll soon be thinking, “Who is Peter to be making pronouncements about the economy and our social fabric over breakfast?”

It’s a good question. I’m no academic. I’m a retired ad man and fortunate to be the former CEO and chairman of Young & Rubicam (Y&R), one of the world’s largest marketing communications corporations. When I was just starting out, I was one of Don Draper’s gofers in the 1960s. You know the type. The studious apprentice in the back room, consigned to research, devouring all the data Y&R routinely gathered about consumers. I learned quickly how to assemble reams of those dry numbers and stories into a picture of what middle America was thinking, feeling, and doing. When I handed it to the creative side of our shop, they crafted it into “The mind is a terrible thing to waste” or “the softer side of Sears.” We made fortunes for some corporations. We made life better for others. In incremental ways, things improved all over. I was proud of what we did, even though those days are over, big time.

What exactly did we do for consumers? We plumbed their hearts and understood what they faced in their daily lives. We knew them inside and out, and we fashioned messages that spoke directly to their needs. All this worked because our data recorded what people told us they needed. Give people what they need, and life gets better. That was what drove us. And I leveraged that skill for decades, staying at the same company, rising through the ranks until I became the company’s CEO and chairman.

In retirement I find myself, like Ken, trying to put my economic privilege to good use. (My wealth is extremely modest compared with Ken’s, so I’m lucky to move in his circles and to consider him one of my best friends.) I realize I can’t stop doing what I did when I had to earn my paycheck. I’m doing exactly the same thing—collecting reams of data, paying attention to the news, putting it together into a picture at my desk and my dining-room table, in my kitchen, in the backseat on a ride to the airport. It’s a compulsion. I’m still taking the pulse of the American public, and from where I sit, the pulse is getting harder and harder to find. It’s frighteningly weak.

The question is whether I can aim my skills in the opposite direction—up the income ladder toward the people who were once my clients, the people who can help revive and strengthen that pulse. I’m hoping that with Ken’s help, I can reach the men and women at the top end of the economic system—the ones who once engaged me to connect with consumers.

Ken orders his egg whites with some spinach and whatever other vegetables are handy back in the galley.

“And a fried tomato. Sliced horizontally. Cup of coffee,” he says, handing the waitress his menu. “So, Peter, what gives?”

Tentatively, I start my elevator speech. People are stuck. They can’t move up the ladder. They don’t have enough money to get by. I see it everywhere. I tell him, “I read a story about a woman who was selling her blood to pay bills.”

“Yep. Saw it. It isn’t right.”

I perk up. He listens patiently for a while longer as I go through my pitch. I tell him it’s no longer possible for most people to build a better life through hard work and sensible choices. “People are carrying more and more debt.”

“Peter, Peter! I get it!” he says. “You done? You got more?”

“That depends,” I say, smiling. “Are you with me?”

“I get it. You’re right. We have a serious problem,” he says. “This is bad business. It’s not sustainable. We’ll get into trouble. Peter, listen. If we don’t fix this, we’re dead. This isn’t temporary. This is structural. I’ve been thinking about this for months.”

It’s better than I expected: Ken and I are on the same page.

“We’re looking at a crisis of opportunity,” he says. “People have no way to move into higher-paying jobs. Wages are just barely keeping up with inflation. It didn’t used to be like this. When it came to profit, used to be even the janitor got to wet his beak. Wages used to reward everybody.”

“Minimum wage is impossibly low,” I say.

“Right. Right. But it’s way bigger than that. You get a job, there’s nowhere to go. It used to be entry level, then you moved up. Now you’re stuck. With no way to get more buying power out of that job. Not good. People are frustrated.”

“There’s no mobility.”

“But listen. We need inequality. That’s the thing, Peter. It’s what drives people to do better. You want more. You see the kind of life somebody else has, and you go out and get it. That’s what I did. I love my dad, but I wanted to do more than plumbing. He wanted the same thing for me. Fifty years ago, we had too many choices! You could get ahead in half a dozen ways. Not now. There’s room to move at the top but nowhere else.”

I point out that from what I was seeing, more and more people were being trapped in a downward spiral of debt, which was locking them out of a better life. People are moving down. It simply wasn’t visible yet.

“The pursuit of happiness. That’s the contract, Peter. Play by the rules, get ahead. But nothing better is waiting around the bend for most people. The contract is broken.”

“We need to spread the word about this,” I say.

“I’m listening.”

This book is the outcome of what Ken and I have done since that first breakfast. It’s been many months on the road for both of us, booking meetings with a long list of powerful people—the head of the Ford Foundation, CEOs of highly ranked Fortune 500 corporations, Nancy Gibbs at Time, the Aspen Institute, the Conference Board, and dozens of others. Together, Ken and I drafted an op-ed for the New York Times that got such a tsunami of response that the paper shut down the comments section after the first several thousand were posted.