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Name: Massimo Costa
Job: Chairman, Young & Rubicam and Wunderman, EMEA
Professional mission: Recapture Y&R's greatest days
Personal mantra: Do it now

12.30am Arrive in Kiev, Ukraine, after a late-evening flight. This is going to be a very long day! Off to hotel for a few hours' sleep.

7.00am Wake up to a welcome cup of room-service coffee. While abluting, I never fail to think with a wry grin of that great poster Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe/Y&R did for the new Virgin Atlantic arrivals lounge at Heathrow: "Sit. Shower. Shave."

7.30am Mobile starts ringing, BlackBerry starts pinging. I love the phone, hate e-mail. I've just about managed to convey this to most of my colleagues around Europe.

8.30am Car to meeting. We're in the throes of an acquisition to service our business in Ukraine, an important market for quite a few of Y&R's clients. Ukraine is a great place to do business: opportunities for growth, interesting people, a fantastic entrepreneurial spirit that pervades all aspects of life. I am impressed by our prospective partners' enthusiasm for the knowledge and experience Y&R can bring them. Time for a quick lunch, then off to the airport, catching up on phone and messages as we go.

3.00pm Plane for London. I do a great deal of travelling, but you have to if you want good relationships with clients and the people you work with. I prefer to avoid conference calls, video conferences and the like - technology is wonderful, but it's still impersonal. Anyway, I enjoy seeing people, they're always interesting. Clients, in particular, have taught me a lot about how to run companies.

5.30pm Arrive in London.

6.30pm Prepare for dinner with our Spain chief executive, Rafael Esteve, with whom I'll be travelling to Madrid tomorrow for a meeting with our Telefonica client, one of the world's awesome companies.

8.00pm Businesslike but relaxing dinner with Rafa, who, as well as being a valued colleague, is one of my oldest friends. Like me, he is virtually a Y&R "lifer", and both of us are disciples of the creed that demands agencies focus on what they should be doing best: great creativity and great service. We review what we're doing for Telefonica and how we can anticipate the client's needs.

11.00pm Back to the hotel, force myself to deal with the BlackBerry's ever-growing list, and make the last call to prepare for tomorrow. Maybe I do travel too much.