Roberts concedes the eight-man management board was “a big mistake.” But he stands by his decision to take away the CEO title from Burns. “Mike’s weakness is that he was a classic account guy driven by his own client, and he would deliver within those boundaries,” says Roberts, who insists he gave the experiment six months. “Being a CEO is about paradox. Mike was about either-or; General Mills or nothing. Mike put up barriers; Scott couldn’t break through. People sided with either A or B. I decided to put an end to it.”

Roberts believed the agency’s relationships with its major clients had been solidified—it was time to go after new business. A sole CEO in New York would finally be hired. At the same time, worldwide creative director Bob Isherwood had grown dissatisfied with New York creative director Tod Seisser over the agency’s failure to win industry awards. Roberts agreed. (This was about the same time that Roberts approached Adriance about being head of HR.) After several months, Roberts settled on Mary Baglivo, a longtime Procter & Gamble associate, as his CEO. Seisser would be fired, and London creative director Tony Granger would take over New York.

Burns was furious that he wasn’t brought into the loop until the night before the September 14 meeting. “I sat there at that point and I said to myself, ‘This isn’t where I want to be,’ ” he says. “I was there for 25 years. I ran 50 percent of the agency. So here’s news that the creative director who’d worked with all of my clients was being let go and nobody told me about it? You’re not going to tell me who the new people are because you’re worried about press leaks? I wasn’t able to inform my clients. I wasn’t able to inform the folks that I work with. It was a carnival act of epic proportions.”

After the meeting, Burns sent an e-mail to Roberts outlining his dissatisfaction. Roberts said he might be able to get Burns a salary bump. Burns said he was concerned not about his own salary but about how his team was being treated. He never got a response.

By the time Burns handed in his resignation on February 11, Roberts and Baglivo were expecting it. Negotiations over Burns’s multi-million-dollar separation package had been ongoing and largely amicable.

The Saatchi 17, meanwhile, had kept their plans an airtight secret. Many of the senior members of the group spent their last day at Saatchi attending a leadership-committee meeting chaired by Mary Baglivo. “Several of the General Mills people were there, actively participating,” recalls Baglivo. “It was very nice.”

Baglivo left early that day because it was her daughter’s birthday. At 5:30, she received a call from a frantic HR staffer: Seventeen members of the General Mills team had just quit.

Ironically, the Saatchi 17’s departure was made easier because none of them had service contracts, rare for senior executives like Adriance. “That was a real blunder by Kevin. He thought it allowed him to get rid of them when he wanted. I don’t think he ever thought they would turn it to their advantage,” says a Saatchi insider. “That’s why he can’t sue them.”

Within hours, rumors circulated through the ad world that the seventeen weren’t just leaving; they were going to be hired en masse by Interpublic, a rival conglomerate, and a celebratory dinner was going to be held later that week at ‘21.’ Roberts, who was in Tokyo at the time, caught a flight to Minneapolis and General Mills’ headquarters to speak with Steve Sanger (that Friday, General Mills issued a statement: “We continue to be very pleased with Saatchi’s work on our behalf, and we are looking forward to continuing our 80-year relationship”), then flew back to New York and ordered some of the remaining General Mills staffers to be questioned by company lawyers with a stenographer present.

By Thursday, the seventeen staffers had agreed to join Interpublic but didn’t sign contracts. General Mills, sensing an opening, appealed to Roberts and Adriance to seek a rapprochement. Almost all of them came in for informal meetings, but Roberts assigned the interviews to subordinates and refused to let anyone talk to Adriance.

The meetings were supposed to be secret, but the next morning Roberts announced to Saatchi staffers, “I’ll only take them back if they’re innocent of the conspiracy, committed to Saatchi, and they apologize.” He then released a statement to the press saying, “We will be reviewing whether any of the 17 ex-colleagues have a role to play going forward.” Going public with the meetings hadn’t been part of the deal, and any window of opportunity quickly closed.