When Everyone Chews on the Same Sentence
Martin Sorrell took a sleepy Kent maker of wire baskets and, over three decades, built it into WPP, the biggest advertising company in the world. Recently he called the wreck of it “catatonic.”
It is the wrong word for a wreck. A wreck has already happened. Catatonic is a state of being, and it is the right word for the strategy meant to restore it to growth: in constant motion and responding to nothing, unable to say why a client would still choose WPP at all.
WPP has shed more than eighty percent of its value in eight years, owes close to four billion pounds against a market value under three billion, and just took a sell rating from Goldman Sachs, its own house broker, the bank it pays to talk up its stock, turning the knife on its own client — Goldman rated rivals Publicis and Omnicom a buy the same day. The brand that is supposed to be the world’s great expert in building brands has spent the better part of a decade dissolving its own: JWT, Y&R, Wunderman, Grey, AKQA, the houses that built modern advertising, collapsed into fewer and cheaper units in the name of getting fit for an AI future, a future nobody can describe, forecast, or price.
Almost no one has a map.
The labs least of all. Their valuations run wildly ahead of earnings, and the difference is a bet on the arrival of a general intelligence, the fuzzy thing always just around the corner (roughly $35 billion of Amazon’s stake in OpenAI is contingent on the company either going public or hitting an internally defined AGI milestone). They cannot say when it lands, three years or thirty, or whether it saves the species or ends it. The accelerationist-versus-doomer split runs straight through their own ranks. If the people building it cannot place it in time or say which way it cuts, no one downstream can.
WPP’s latest move has the ring of operational prudence, as all operational changes do: nine thousand jobs gone in a year, half a billion pounds of promised savings, the whole holding company folded into one firm and four divisions. But it is sustaining a system that reshapes itself endlessly and never evolves, a rocket now burning fuel more efficiently but still stuck in low earth orbit.
You can only get smaller and call the shrinking readiness, and torching the brands that made anyone choose you is a peculiar way to prepare for anything.
That Sorrell’s own S4 Capital, built afterward as a rebuke to the holding-company model, is itself down ninety-seven percent and selling its own turnaround only confirms the reflex is universal: the giant and its antidote, both scraping the bottom, reaching for the same AI lever, each selling it as the main character in a new growth story. Sorrell is betting his own comeback on it, telling one interviewer that “AI will completely reshape the industry” — his prescription turns out to be a delivery model, digital-only and data-driven, the marketing services industry remade, in his words, into “technological consultants.”
Everyone is chewing on the same sentence.
Gunfight at the OKR Corral
Carolyn Dewar, who founded McKinsey’s CEO practice and has counseled hundreds of chief executives, wrote in Fortune that “you cannot OKR your way out of a moment that requires fundamental strategic rethinking.”
OKRs, the quarterly objectives-and-key-results scorecards that run most of the corporate world, are an execution tool, a way to drive an organization hard at an objective it has already chosen. Hitting the numbers is an operational count read as strategic success. UnitedHealth now tracks whether its Optum workers run at least one AI query a day and reads the tally as transformation. But it is proof that the tool got opened, not that the healthcare system got any better. Dewar’s point is that driving harder does nothing when the objective itself is in doubt.
Around the time Dewar published her argument in Fortune, OPEN MINDS, which sells market intelligence to healthcare executives, gathered hundreds of them at its strategy institute in New Orleans. It cataloged the hurricane of chaos as “the unknown, the uncertain, and the uncontrolled,” the way Donald Rumsfeld famously tried to sort the knowns from the unknowns. Its prescription was the very discipline Dewar had just filed under liability, only more of it: more OKRs, more scenarios, a plan recut as fast as the market moved.
One voice says you cannot plan your way out of the chaos. The other says plan harder. They agree completely about the storm and split completely on the exit from it.
Marguerite Bérard, who took over ABN AMRO last year as the first woman to run one of the Netherlands’ three biggest banks, told the Wall Street Journal’s Leadership Institute CEO Summit in June that “five-year plans can become obsolete in five days,” and called instead for “a more systemic view of what’s happening.”
What is happening is that leadership vision is, or should be, moving to the system level, where the questions that separate the winners from the losers, the past from the future, are not the ones companies stopped asking so much as the ones that now have to be asked differently, from a different frame. That frame treats complexity not as a problem to eliminate but as a feature to be turned into advantage. It dissolves the boundaries the old map drew: between a company and its market, a product and its category, the thing sold and the ground it is sold on.
And it treats creativity as something harder than taste.
Creativity becomes computational imagination and system design, the work of building the structure inside which everyone else must move. Sorrell was reaching for this when he called agencies technological consultants, and stopped a level short: the consultant runs the old work through new tools, while the system designer writes the frame those tools run inside.
The smart companies grasp this as a leadership skill — they make themselves the infrastructure that produces and curates markets, understanding the new rules of power and leverage, and positioning themselves as a keystone: the right position beats all the capacity money can buy.
Like Blackstone.
Everyone else buys AI tools and scatters them to make the past a little more productive. Blackstone went the other way and is building a new economic system, the ground the whole boom stands on. It committed five billion dollars to the sites that will run Google’s own AI and became the largest financial investor in data centers anywhere, though that phrase names a line item and misses the move. The pieces are physical: the buildings, the land, the fiber, and above all the power. Power is the chokepoint, the one input the boom cannot spin up on command, and Blackstone owns it at the source. It did not buy a model. It invented the orbit around which new industries are born, the center of gravity the rest of the system cannot route around.
That is the positional value of becoming a keystone.
It is not scale or spend that shapes a market. It is position, and position is the real estate a company holds in the mind before it holds any on the ground. Strategy is language before it is capital, a whole system told as a story before the first acre changes hands, before the first line of code is written, before the first competitor sees it coming. Strategy at the system level reframes the LLM as strategic narrative architecture, not technology, and everyone else is running queries inside a frame someone built for them.
This is what Bérard meant by a more systemic view. A systemic view is not a wider angle on the same storm. It is owning the ground the storm cannot move.
Once More, With Feeling
Nestlé is the other kind of company.
The biggest food maker on earth lost two chief executives and a chairman in the year to last autumn, its shares down more than forty percent since 2022, and its newest CEO answered with sixteen thousand job cuts, a portfolio sharpened to four core categories, and a favorite OKR metric called real internal growth. Analysts pointed out that his turnaround plan mirrored the one his ousted predecessor had pitched, which had mirrored the one before that. What was new was mostly the conviction with which he sold it.
The intelligence in language does not live in a single word. It lives in narrative architecture, in the shaping of a whole system. A company that only predicts the next word writes nothing new. It chews on the same sentence, extending the pattern it was trained on, self-replicating inside a loop it does not control. Modern strategy starts a new loop. It writes the sentence the market has not heard.
If WPP is truly catatonic, it is from being stuck by the autocomplete reflex, the next-word prediction of an autonomous chatbot. The reflex is now the common feature of strategic failure, every stalled company auto-generating the next expected move, mistaking commoditized means for novel ends.
Last October WPP signed a four-hundred-million-dollar “frontier research” partnership with Google and announced it as a turning point, though the tools it licenses sit on the shelf for every rival who signs the same check. WPP and Blackstone both shook hands with Google, but at different levels of the system. WPP licensed Google’s tools, and Blackstone is building the ground for Google’s own AI.
One rents the frontier. The other invents it.
/ jgs
John G. Singer is the founder and Executive Director of Blue Spoon and the author of When Burning Man Comes to Washington: A Field Manual for Riding Chaos. Hardcore Zen is published weekly on Substack.
Disclosure: Blue Spoon has no financial relationship — equity, advisory, or commercial — with any company named in this essay. The analysis is independent.