About Bruce

I am Bruce McTague.

In a career spanning over 30 years, I’ve been involved with a wide range of industries including packaged goods, restaurant, pharmaceutical, retail, business-to-business, startups, technology and tourism. I won’t bore you with all the details, but the bottom line is I have touched so many businesses across so many categories the headline for my career should probably be Collector of experiences and knowledge.”

I am more a generalist <unfortunately in a specialist world> and believe complexity is something we should embrace, complicated is how humans negatively impact complexity and simplicity is, well, simply an effective way of navigating complexity.

 

Business: I have been fortunate to have glanced off some of the most incredibly talented marketing and business people in the world. In addition, because I spent most of my career in account management in advertising agencies, I have not only been involved in marketing, but also been able to tap into the inner workings (operations, innovation, new product development, organizational behavior, strategic planning, to name several) of a wide variety of businesses.

 

Personal: I have tried to treat every experience in my Life and each “glancing moment” throughout life & business as an opportunity to learn something, cataloging each learning in my memory banks to be reapplied in future situations. From the maid in an eastern European hotel to the Prime Minister of Ukraine, from the CEO of MailboxesEtc to the person in the mailroom at any company, I have tried to learn something from everyone (this also includes brief elevator conversations with Jesse Jackson in New York, and Kofi Annan in Kiev, both of whom impressed me with their humble one on one charm and charisma, reminding me that even the great are just people).

Having learned something from all of these moments, hopefully I can share something with someone else.

 

On a personal note:

I used to always have a pencil tucked behind my ear. It could be that I like to write things down as soon as I think of them, or it could be that I like to poke people. I may not still have a pencil stuck behind my ear, but I still like using pencils. I am known for my “thought scribbles” and sleep well at night knowing that my scribbles reside in desk drawers around the world.

I am a cynical optimist. I am pragmatically hopeful. And I tend to believe my manifesto centers on “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.”

I graduated from high school in Vermont, moved on to the University of Southern California, and later an MBA at Wake Forest University. I’ve worked in Dallas, New York, Atlanta, Tampa, Greenville (South Carolina), Cincinnati, Raleigh, San Francisco and currently in Atlanta.  In all, I’ve lived in eleven states throughout my life (only 39 left to go).

If you would like some additional work experience details and see what a number of people have said about me, visit my LinkedIn site or contact me directly by email.