To Andy Law and David Abraham, their efforts are a general restorative for business as a whole. They evangelize the power of ethics in business, a message they first articulated on the Chrysalis committee and which they have now instantiated in their own company.

"Everyone will think differently about the planet in the year 2000," says Abraham, "and suddenly a lot of pennies will drop and a lot of opinions and political climates will change and a lot more thinking will have been done about business and society generally. Well no longer be seen as all that revolutionary."

An open window in the St. Lukes library leads to a narrow patch of tar-papered terrace. A few of the employees have crawled through the narrow opening and onto the roof to enjoy a moment of sunshine on what feels like the first Spring day.

"We can keep explaining it," says David Abraham as he looks out over the London rooftops, "but this is just us, this is the company we are, this is the company we want to run, this is what we want to do."

Stevan Alburty (alburty@earthlink.net) is a freelance writer based in New York City and former MIS director for Chiat/Day.

Sidebar: The Law of St. Luke's

Chairman Andy Law's Observations on the Future of Advertising.

Cultural Resonance

Our goal is to produce communications that bear no resemblance to any advertising genre. Advertising is an artifact outside of real life; what we produce becomes part of everyday life itself. We're looking for cultural resonance. For example, we produced a piece of work for Ikea, the large furniture retailer, that's actually a protest song: women protesting having to have chintz in their homes. We're encouraging them to chuck it out. Now this campaign has entered everyday life -- it's in politics, it's in all the papers, it's on television. People are talking about it because it taps into what's going on right now.

We don't even call ourselves an advertising agency. We call ourselves a communications resource office. The truth about companies has more energy than any fabricated advertising slogans. Every company has its own truths. It's even more true on the Net, a modern version of the old marketplace. There will still be people bullshitting on it, but the people who are putting honest communication across will succeed.

Inventive Early

We use a process that we call "get inventive early." It sounds long, but it's actually faster than the normal process. There are fewer mistakes and the client is part of the team.

We start by gathering everyone around the table as equals, and they think in free-form about the problem they've been given. There's no rule about who's got the greatest ability to contribute. The idea is king. Rather than having one person whose job is to write the creative brief for a project, we have a creative feeding frenzy among the whole group.

Then about a week later we have a strategic work session. We get the client in to combine its knowledge of the market with our creative input. We tell the client, "We're not magicians here. We want to know what you know. You may not even know what it is you know. So we're going to get it out of your heads." Together we write the brief.

Two weeks after that, we have a creative work session. We have a room with hundreds of pieces of paper, or bits of film, or photographs -- all sorts of things that are the project team's first thoughts. The client comes into the room, and we say, "Nothing's for sale. Don't tell us what you like or don't like." What we want to discuss is the most culturally resonant idea. Only then do we return with something that we think will work.

Ego and Greed

The only thing that changes people's lives is when you change the fundamental structure of ownership. Most advertising agencies are groups of entrepreneurial, self-employed people who get together to make themselves a million bucks. But if you create an agency designed to make you rich, the same thing always happens. You put all your energy into years one, two, and three. By year four you've got lots of people working for you. Then they start having a few ideas themselves and asking for option schemes and shares. By years five and six you're already thinking how to get your money out, and in years seven and eight, you sell the company. It's the most uncreative form of business you can imagine -- you destroy the thing you created in order to make it successful for you.

We've created this company to live beyond us. We're just renting resources. Remember that we're a collective here -- everybody is equal. What's disappeared are ego and greed, the two major driving forces behind the advertising business.

Tough Utopia