WPP's 2025 revenue dropped by 8.1% from 2024 to £13,550 million (or about 18,306 million USD) for the year. Rose, a former Microsoft executive who took over the agency group last September, didn't mince words with investors regarding the just-closed quarter, acknowledging that the business is underperforming and lacked stability.
They arrive without a decade or more of assumptions about how work should be done - more of a blank sheet of paper. That allows them to challenge the status quo and rethink processes from first principles. His advice for junior consultants at EY is to use that to their advantage: be bold, ask questions about the way things are done, and lean into the use of technology.
There's just one problem, though: While many know how to declare an initiative, far fewer understand what it takes to carry the project through the friction of daily workflows. What separates those rare successes from the long list of initiatives that fade into half-measures is not only leadership and resourcing, but also the way organizations adapt, measure, and learn as they go.
According to McKinsey, fewer than one in three organizational transformations actually succeed in improving performance and sustaining those gains, even when leaders are well-intentioned and highly motivated.
