The news landed on a Saturday, which is how everyone knew it had not been planned. Martin Sorrell out at WPP after more than thirty years, in a statement short enough to read twice before the coffee cooled. By Monday the trades had opinions. By Wednesday the opinions had opinions.
Almost all of the argument was about him. The more interesting question is about the company.
WPP started as a maker of wire shopping baskets and became the largest advertising holding company on earth by buying things, relentlessly, for three decades, with essentially one man deciding what to buy and what it was worth. That is roughly two hundred thousand people whose employer has been explained to the market as a biography.
When the founder is the brand, succession is not a personnel announcement, it is a rebrand nobody scheduled and nobody briefed.
I have watched smaller versions of this from inside brand strategy rooms. A founder-led client, a founder who is genuinely great, a leadership team that has never had to articulate the logic behind a single decision because the founder simply made it and everyone agreed it was right. Then the founder gets sick, or bored, or pushed, and the company discovers it has been running for years on taste it never wrote down.
Three things you owe yourself long before that day.
One, separate the judgment from the person. Get the founder to explain, out loud, on the record, why they said no to the last five things. That is your strategy. It has been your strategy the entire time, it was just living in one skull.
Two, build a story about the company that is not a story about a career. Apple survived 2011 because the product narrative was larger than the man, and the man was enormous. American Apparel did not survive Dov Charney, because underneath him there was only ever him.
Three, let other people be the face while it is still optional. If your CEO is the only quotable person in the building, you do not have spokespeople, you have a single point of failure with a passport.
If your CEO is the only quotable person in the building, you do not have spokespeople, you have a single point of failure with a passport.
WPP will be fine, probably, in the way large things are fine. But it now has to answer in public, with clients watching and rivals dialing, a question it was free to defer for thirty years.
I walked past the Wieden building in the Pearl this morning on the way to Ovation and thought about the two names on that door. Every agency with a person's name on it is betting the name will eventually mean something without the person. Very few of them have written down what.