"She's a rare find," says Biscuit Filmworks, LA director Noam Murro about his partnership with Biscuit EP Shawn Lacy. "I am lucky to have her. Biscuit is lucky to have her. The industry is lucky to have her."

The industry doesn't know how lucky. If it hadn't been for a fateful, failing grade on a university calculus test, the ad world might have lost Lacy to the hallowed halls of the legal profession.

Thankfully, Lacy's disdain for integrals and infinite series steered her towards a career that has seen her grace the agency side as a producer for Young & Rubicam on major accounts like KFC and, later, to the production side: first with HKM and then as founder and EP of Biscuit. Since its launch in 2000, Biscuit has grown from a one-director company with just Murro behind the camera to a hugely respected nine-director production powerhouse, evidenced by Biscuit's second place appearance in the top prodco list at the Cannes Lions this past June and cemented by the alliance struck early this year with Independent to bring its vision to the UK.

Add to these achievements a chairperson appointment at the 16th annual AICP show, where Lacy led a 35-person committee, and a brisk jog through the 26-mile Los Angeles marathon last year and it's not hard to see why she garners widespread industry respect.

"Shawn is an amazing person to work with," says Independent EP Richard Packer. "She is incredibly well-rounded and has a full understanding of directors and the creative process whilst never losing sight of the all-important balance to be met with agencies and clients. There are very few like her."

Boards caught up with Lacy in the middle of a whirlwind vacation where she spoke to us from a remote island a few hours from Hamburg, Germany and again from a train on her way to Berlin. Her next stops were London and France, which brought back memories of sound travel advice that she ignored years ago from family friend and Chiat/Day founder Jay Chiat.

Honestly, it was my first professional mistake. I should have listened to him about taking a year off to travel after college [instead of going directly into advertising], but I was excited to get working. In hindsight, as I'm on my first real vacation now, I probably should have taken his advice.

I went to Duke University. I studied political science and French. I went to Duke's law school but I failed calculus freshman year and, when you average an F into three A-minuses, you're not going to a good law school anymore. My parents were both architects and designers, so I always had an appreciation for design, plus the advertising classes at Duke were fantastic. So that's how it happened.

I started as an account co-coordinator at Y&R, New York and I did that for a couple of years before moving toward agency producing. But I wanted to be closer to the production part of the process. On the agency side, the in-production part was the most appealing to me. It was exciting and challenging, but I took a step back [going into production fully] because I went from being an agency producer. At the time, I produced a million-plus dollar KFC job and then three weeks later I'm a PA looking for work in Los Angeles. It was definitely a few steps back to do it but I'm glad I did.

In a director, I look for a vision, a clear point of view, a charisma. It doesn't so much have to be different from the norm, but there has to be a conviction in your ideas. With Noam, whom I met at HKM, he was the smartest, funniest, most creative person I'd met in the business. The way he sees the world is amazing. Probably doing Saturn "Sheet Metal" with him, the one that featured people on the road with no cars because the people were representative of the cars, was the most memorable ad. It was one of the biggest jobs we'd done. It was a beautiful idea and he did a fantastic job, and we developed a relationship with Goodby [Silverstein & Partners] that lasted a long time. That was the turning point. I don't think we ever envisioned that Biscuit would grow to be what it is now. We started off with fairly humble aspirations of doing great work and our plan was to find other like-minded people to be with us, but I couldn't be happier.

What I love about this industry is the people that I work with, the energy and the creativity. It's a challenging environment and the people are wonderful, smart and talented, but I think there are places where there is a lot of fear leveled at decision-making that bogs down the creative process. We need more risk-taking and braver choices.

The craziest experience that I've ever had was when I was producing a commercial for Polly-O string cheese in my Y&R days. It starred a bunch of costumed parrots and the costumer suddenly quit

and disappeared. I stayed up all night with the production company EP sewing jackets for these parrots to wear the next morning for the 7am shoot. But just think about the stories we get to tell and the places we get to go... there isn't any other industry like that.