Eliot Harrison and the Things Worth Keeping

Eliot Harrison keeps the badges. After more than two decades at MCS, he shared a photograph of conference credentials he had accumulated: a cheerful administrative avalanche of plastic sleeves, paper rectangles and tangled lanyards. Here was a career with the filing system removed. Every badge had once been useful for getting through a door. Together, they had become a rather more interesting record of the person who kept walking through them.

“Anyone else save all of their congress credentials?” he asked. The replies supplied a little office archaeology. Elaine Colón remembered a corkboard in his old office. Jennifer Silvent said she had saved twenty years of badges herself, perhaps taking the idea from him. Others recognised the drawer, or admitted to throwing their credentials away. A modest question about storage had turned into a conversation about memory.

A badge collection makes an appealing place to begin a profile of an executive. It puts the trips ahead of the title. Harrison is now CEO and president of MCS Health, based in Morristown, New Jersey. His path there has involved staying with one agency long enough to see his own responsibilities change, its leadership change, and the tools of its trade change around him.

Thirteen years before the president’s chair

Harrison joined MCS in 2004. By the time he became president on May 3, 2017, he had served as executive vice president and spent thirteen years inside the business. The appointment put him in charge of long-range planning, the agency’s talent and resources, and the delivery of its ideas and client service. It was a promotion built on an extended apprenticeship within the organisation he would lead.

Joe Boyd, then the agency’s CEO, described Harrison’s approach in terms of closeness to the client’s daily work. Harrison wanted the agency to function as an extension of the client’s team. That description is unusually practical for a promotion announcement. It concerns where a communications adviser stands in relation to the people making decisions, rather than how many services the adviser can list on a presentation slide.

Boyd also credited him with creativity and an ability to encourage improvement in others. Those qualities were presented together: new ideas, accompanied by the ability to get people to pursue them. A president has to make room for both. An idea that remains in the person who conceived it is of limited use to the people who have to deliver the work.

A family connection, and a working history

There is a family connection in that succession. Harrison is Boyd’s eldest son. Boyd co-founded MCS in 1985, following a career that included reporting, teaching journalism and working in corporate public relations. The firm Harrison joined already had close to two decades of history. He entered an established enterprise, with an existing reputation and a founder whose professional life had moved between the newsroom and the client organisation.

That connection gives the thirteen years preceding Harrison’s appointment additional weight. A surname alone does not describe the sequence here. The public chronology includes joining the agency, progressing to executive vice president and then taking the president’s role. Family and work are both part of this history; collapsing either into the other would make the account less useful.

Boyd died in December 2024. His career remains part of the agency’s institutional story, while Harrison’s job concerns its continuing operations. For an executive in that position, continuity is a concrete responsibility: existing relationships, colleagues’ accumulated experience, and decisions about what the organisation should become. The family connection adds a personal dimension to a business whose future still has to be built one assignment at a time.

The president still owes the room an idea

Harrison’s current leadership biography gives him strategic and creative oversight of the agency’s accounts, with responsibility for keeping new ideas coming. That is a useful description of the work behind his title. Oversight can sound like a distant activity, performed from a chair at the end of a table. Here it is tied to the agency’s ability to keep proposing something useful.

The same leadership roster distributes responsibility among named colleagues. Chad Hyett is executive vice president. Laura de Zutter’s remit includes measurable results and return on investment. Amanda D’Anton manages campaign delivery against time and budget. There is a recognisable operating structure beneath the language of creativity: people responsible for the idea, people responsible for the result, and people responsible for getting the work out the door.

The agency also describes making room for staff development and new skills by valuing people’s time. Read alongside Harrison’s remit, that creates a practical question for leadership. If new thinking is part of the job, the working day needs space for it. A packed calendar can look reassuringly industrious while leaving very little room for anyone to think of a better calendar.

Advice that outlasts an assignment

Harrison’s public recommendations offer another view of his working relationships. Greg Healy describes more than a decade of partnership across communications and business teams. He singles out Harrison’s willingness to offer advice even when he is not involved in a project. That is a particular form of availability: the relationship continues beyond the boundaries of an active assignment.

Healy also speaks about his kindness and care for clients and colleagues. Akram Elembaby, another collaborator, praises his professionalism and ability to combine experience with the responsiveness of a smaller firm. These are colleagues’ assessments, and their value lies in their specificity. The recurring subject is how Harrison works with people, including whether his judgment remains accessible when there is no immediate piece of work attached.

Harrison’s own recommendation of former colleague Nicole Glozzy rewards similarly practical habits. He recalls her three years at MCS, describing organised, timely work and a proactive interest in improving how the office functioned. The compliment concerns useful actions. It suggests what he chose to recognise publicly: follow-through, willingness to help, and attention to the everyday details that keep a workplace working.

The budget has an owner

In August 2025, as MCS joined Worldwide Partners, Harrison explained how he approached agency collaboration. He described a business without competing departments fighting for slices of a client’s spending. His compact explanation was: “It’s not our budget, it’s our clients.” The sentence places the client’s objective ahead of the agency’s internal allocation of work.

“It’s not our budget, it’s our clients.”

Eliot Harrison, August 2025

He said MCS would work with another agency if that partner had a solution that helped the client’s business goals. Joining a network of independent agencies gave that approach a wider field of possible collaborators and geographic reach. Independence, in this account, accommodates cooperation. It does not require every capability to live under the same roof.

There is a demanding commercial choice inside that position. Sending work to a partner means accepting that the useful answer may sit elsewhere. Harrison framed the decision around the relationship and the assignment. For a client, the significance is straightforward: the agency selecting the team should be able to explain why each member belongs there.

A new chapter needs people to run it

By April 2026, Harrison was discussing a further round of organisational changes. MCS announced Jamie Yacco as executive vice president, Elle Fitamant and Tiffany Rutkowski as vice presidents, and Bob Pearson as a strategic adviser. The additions addressed operations, campaign expertise, digital work and innovation. The announcement identified Harrison as president and CEO.

Yacco’s responsibilities include agency operations and preparing the organisation for growth. Rutkowski’s work focuses on digital and influencer capabilities. Pearson joined as Growth and Innovation Architect. Taken together, the appointments show where Harrison and the agency were putting leadership attention: the machinery of delivery, the skills clients request, and the ability to develop the next set of services.

The earlier year had included commercial pressure. MCS reported a 6.4 percent decline in 2025 fee income, to about $4.3 million. In April 2026, Harrison described investments in AI-enabled analytics and data intelligence, alongside a more flexible approach to global partnerships. Those details give the new appointments context. The organisation was changing how it worked while responding to a changing market.

He also described demand for greater precision and measurement. These are useful ambitions because they can be tested against work delivered. The leadership question is whether new tools and new colleagues make the agency more helpful to the people employing it. Harrison’s account of the changes returns to that practical obligation, even as the vocabulary of the business develops.

Keep the badges. Make room for the next one.

Harrison’s collection has the advantage of resisting a polished career narrative. The photograph is crowded and funny, a drawer doing its best under difficult circumstances. The comments remember a corkboard and a habit passed between colleagues. It is a small, recognisable piece of office life, preserved by someone whose work now includes deciding how the office should evolve.

The badges also bring the chronology back to human scale. Joining in 2004 and becoming president in 2017 are clean entries on a timeline. The accumulated credentials are messier evidence of time spent showing up. Harrison’s next chapter brings new colleagues, partnerships and tools. Somewhere alongside that work is a much smaller outstanding assignment: finding a filing system equal to his enthusiasm for keeping the evidence.