First, let me introduce myself, but without sounding too self-promotional, which isn’t easy as I’ve had a somewhat catapultic career.
Sure, some call it luck, but I’ve always found if you work hard enough, luck will find you and people will pat you on the back and say you’re one helluva lucky guy.
I started out along the luck road when I became a newspaper reporter, working at small papers until one day I was lucky to be offered a job as reporter at one or the largest newspapers in the country in the city where I was born, The Philadelphia Inquirer.
I was lucky to cover and write many front-page stories from interviewing media stars like boxing legend Muhammad Ali to a president who became a punching bag himself during a scandal called Watergate, Richard Nixon.
Then I was lucky to land a job with one of the top PR firms in Manhattan and was assigned their largest client, Kellogg Company, for whose chairman I wrote speeches. One of them was about rescuing poor Tony the Tiger from the Federal Trade Commission’s plan to break up the three largest cereal companies Kellogg, General Mills and Post that it was calling an oligopoly.
After my speech was luckily reprinted in The New York Times, the then Kellogg’s chairman was so happy he flew in from Battle Creek, just to take me out to eat—of course breakfast! The oligopoly threat didn’t materialize.
Then the luckiest thing happened.
American Broadcasting Companies asked me to go to work for them, where I was lucky to meet TV genius programmer Fred Silverman who luckily liked the way I wrote his speeches and press releases. So, when he became CEO of NBC, I hit the luck jackpot when I was the only one he brought along with him to NBC and made me his Vice President, Assistant to the President.
What amazing luck to zoom up to nose-bleed level overlooking that skating rink at 30 Rock where I was the #2-ranked executive at what was then one of the top three television networks. Not only lucky, I was proud as a Peacock.
After a starring role in a few hit seasons there, I decided to really test my luck and I started my own PR firm in Manhattan, TransMedia Group, and as luck would have it, I landed at the time what was then the largest company in America as a client, AT&T.
Yes, besides Ma Bell, I got The City of New York, as a client too. What luck!
Forty-some years later, I’m still lucky to be alive and kicking still as the CEO of my award-winning PR firm today serving clients worldwide from its headquarters in Boca Raton, Florida, with the help of my resourceful daughter, Adrienne Mazzone, as its president.
And now together with my beautiful Brazilian wife Rita . . .
Luck be my lady tonight!
Tom Madden’s message here is “don’t kid yourself, luck takes good old-fashioned hard work” now coming even faster as it’s been rejuvenated, expanded and made more effective with tech like AI. He knows well because he’s forever working hard himself, running his PR firm, TransMedia Group, while writing books and blogs in between proposals to prospective PR clients explaining how his firm will make them even bigger, wealthier and more famous by providing that crème de la crème additive, publicity!