WPP announced that Mark Read was stepping down on June 9.  

One month and one day later the company announced his successor—Cindy Rose. 

That’s got to be one of the shortest CEO searches in the history of CEO searches for a major company like WPP.  

Or maybe not. When the Read stepping down announcement was made, it did say a search for his replacement was underway.  

My guess is that it was well underway. Maybe so underway that the job was already Roses—except for maybe some contract details--by the time Read’s resignation was announced. 

Current board chair Philip Jansen joined the board last September most likely with a mission to implement a CEO change. Read was in the CEO hot seat for seven years and started the job with a three-year turnaround plan—the company had lost its way during the last few years of Martin Sorrell’s reign. 

Read did do a lot of streamlining, trying to make a complicated and unwieldy conglomerate into a lean mean marketing machine that clients could understand better. 

He also invested billions in technology, particularly AI-related technology. But when a three-year turnaround plan stretches to seven and the financial numbers are getting worse, not better, it’s no surprise that the board might have decided Read’s time was up. 

And Jansen had at least 10 months to get to know Rose, a WPP board member since 2019. And he almost certainly knew her or knew of her before then. She’s credited with orchestrating a major turnaround at telecom company Vodafone’s consumer business which she ran from 2013 to 2016. Vodafone is a competitor to BT Group which Jansen ran as CEO from 2019 to 2024. BT Group has also been a client of WPP agencies including EssenceMediacom and Wunderman Thompson.  

So it’s not unreasonable to think that Jansen knew from the start of his WPP board tenure that Rose—a tech expert and turnaround specialist (in his own field of expertise) who knew WPP quite well from seven years of board service would make a great successor to Read.  

She was likely the top candidate all along, even though the media didn’t see her that way. In fact, they hardly saw her at all.