I’m fascinated with Danielle Sacks’ profile of former ad man Alex Bogusky in the current issue of Fast Company. I think you should click here and read it.

While at Crispin Porter Bogusky, Bogusky was the creative director behind relaunching Burger King’s King (and the viral hit “Subservient Chicken”) as well as the terrific campaign against teen drinking and drugs,  and the very gimmicky magazine inserts for Mini. One of the magazines I get had a punch-out-and-assemble cardboard Mini on one page, and little punch-out traffic cones on the opposite page. Yes, I popped out both and played with them. During his tenure, CP+B became the hot, hip agency, and for good reason:  their work was clever, and they delivered a lot of sales for clients. In 2009, Ad Agency named it the agency of the decade.

In this profile, Bogusky now makes himself out to be a man transformed. He’s left advertising and discovered soul-searching. With about $45 million now in hand, he’s hanging out all day writing or playing or doing finger paints in a cottage he calls FearLess, and handing out keycards to the cottage to other cool people he thinks can help change the world. I read all this and thought about Alfred Nobel, who suffered the accidental indignity of reading his own obituary, which condemned him for inventing dynamite; Nobel set out to redeem himself by creating the Nobel Prizes. Bogusky devoted a lot of his life to getting people to consume more from Burger King, Coke, Domino’s, Jose Cuervo, and Kraft, and now he regrets it. Because — and please don’t think I’m cynical — he can now afford it. Easily. Stylishly. It doesn’t seem that these self-doubts plagued him while he was devising those campaigns.

Evidently, I wasn’t the only one starting to wonder a thing or two about Bogusky’s transformation, because  Sacks then goes and talks to a lot of Bogusky’s former employees. A far different picture emerges. What Sacks thinks she finds isn’t interesting (news alert:  creative types can be narcissistic). What’s more interesting is the theory that Bogusky had manipulated Sacks into getting exactly the kind of profile he wanted — until she figured that out and turned on him for the back half of the piece. This is the biggest such reversal I’ve ever seen in a profile. It’s like the last few minutes of “The Sixth Sense,” which has you revisiting everything you just saw, but now from a completely different angle.

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