WPP’s CEO on Turning a Portfolio of Companies Into a Growth Machine

WPP is now the world’s largest advertising and marketing services company, with 190,000 employees in 3,000 offices in 112 countries. Particularly in our early years, we grew primarily by acquiring smaller firms—even today some people think of WPP as a holding company. In truth, many of our acquisitions enjoy autonomy, and some might be happy if we operated on the Berkshire Hathaway model, as hands-off owners in a decentralized organization. But as I sorted through our financial crisis in the early 1990s, I realized that making acquisitions and trying to grow into a very large company was pointless without a cohesive strategy. Unlike Berkshire’s, all our acquisitions are in the same industry. We needed to find a way to make one plus one equal more than two—to leverage our size for competitive advantage. That was the only way we could add value.