This last issue of Esquire had an excellent article on how Mad Men is applicable to our day and age:

The man in the gray flannel suit is the direct ancestor of the man behind the MacBook watching him…

A huge number of Mad Men fans are haunted by the same question that haunts Don Draper: What’s the trend?

This question is the basis of virtually every current intellectual struggle, from the creation of epic novels to technology blog posts, from Thomas Friedman’s op-eds to bankers’ briefing meetings. It is the question George Saunders had to confront every time he wrote a story for Tenth of December, and it’s the problem the copywriter who made the Pepsi Next ad for the Super Bowl had to figure out as well. What is happening now? What are we in the middle of becoming?

A while back I watched this special feature of Mad Men. It does a fun job of tying some sound business rules with examples from the previous four (at the time) seasons of Mad Men.

Season 6 starts this Sunday and following each episode we will write a post about one of these rules on how to succeed in business Draper-style and tie it back to what had transpired during the episode of the week.