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And finally, despite and because of our relationship with AT&T, when it came to telecommunications, no agency on the planet was more informed or experienced.

For all these reasons, the creatives decided that rather than split up into classic art-director/copywriter teams, we’d jam as a team and make decisions as a team. I can think of no other time or place I’d worked where this kind of experiment would have succeeded, but at that agency, at that moment, it worked beautifully. We staked out a creative war room and talked for days. If someone had a good thought or an interesting visual idea, someone else would write it on a piece of paper or the occasional paper plate and stick it on the wall. Then we’d riff on it some more until it became something else entirely.

Somehow, because we didn’t have to worry about anyone higher up judging or killing or bastardizing our work, individual ownership had become less important than winning the account, saving our jobs, and keeping the agency alive.

One afternoon, buzzing with creative adrenaline and camaraderie, one of us decided that if we were to succeed at all, our group needed a name, a gimmick, and an ethos. We weren’t laid-back cool like some of the newer West Coast shops, nor were we slick, pony-tailed, Armani-wearing East Coast sharks. What we were doing was fairly socialist, but it was agreed that quoting Karl Marx’s manifesto and using hammer-and-sickle imagery probably wasn’t the way to go with blue-chip clients in a society that, last we checked, was still based on capitalism. We were hardworking and selfless craftsmen and craftswomen not prone to the gimmicks of the moment. Then someone blurted it out: “Like the Amish!” So from that point on we called ourselves, for internal purposes only, the Amish Group.

To differentiate ourselves from the pack, someone suggested that we grow chin beards (the women would be permitted to wear fakes), wear black suits and hats and white shirts, and travel to client meetings by horse and buggy. In the days that followed, when passing one another in the halls, we’d say things like “How goes the visual harvest today, Brother Magee?” Or “Your (hideous) chin beard is looking especially handsome today, Brother Othmer.”

It was working. The work on the wall was getting good. And the account team and planners, feeding off our energy or perhaps riding a caution-to-the-wind, fin du monde vibe of their own, wasn’t just liking our work; they were making it better. Not only that, but they were bringing in provocative and unexpected consultants for us, from experts on the western mind-set to the Internet futurist George Gilder, who told us that the future would be built not on twisted copper but on magic fibers born of sand and glass.

What is interesting to me now about the work we produced for that pitch is that it reflected the spirit in which it was made. The campaign or tagline, “Life’s Better Here,” was consistent with the boom mentality of the mid-1990s American West, and was supported by ads that were based on an ethos, an idealistic, patently western telecom manifesto about what people deserve and should demand from their phone company. “Here, Josey Wales has a pager,” and “Here, a handshake still beats an e-mail,” and “Here, work and play don’t argue.” It was good stuff.

I was chosen as one of two creatives from the Amish Group to present the campaign (sans chin beard) in Denver. It went well. Within days we’d been told that we’d won their business, that US West’s next ad campaign would be “Life’s Better Here,” and I was told that I’d been promoted to senior vice president and would be the creative director on the account.

This was the type of opportunity that I thought I’d wanted for years and absolutely felt I was ready for. A senior position running a major account. After years of paying dues and suffering and benefiting from the myriad managerial styles of my superiors, especially my creative directors, I would have a chance to do