WPP may have found a much-needed counterweight to Martin Sorrell. The ad group's chief executive is getting a new chairman in the form of industrialist Roberto Quarta. Sorrell says Quarta will help deliver WPP's strategy, which includes a drive for greater "horizontality" - WPP-speak for operational seamlessness. But the new chair needs to make it clear early on that his location relative to Sorrell is more vertical than horizontal.
Quarta is an imaginative appointment. His background is a long way from a media business whose services are largely virtual. He led UK engineer BBA through a period of strong share-price performance before stepping back to enter private equity in 2001. He has kept a hand in UK public company life with non-executive roles at BAE Systems, Powergen and Smith & Nephew, which he chairs.
The new chairman has a reputation for being tough and unsentimental: this is not someone who would readily sign off on a new pinball machine to assuage creative ad agency egos. His background gives investors reasonable confidence that he will be firm in the boardroom without being overly "executive" in his role. The risk is that a lack of industry experience could leave him sidelined in boardroom debates about apps and media convergence.
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But Quarta's job is to run the board, not the company. WPP has plenty of staff with an opinion on media strategy already, but has lacked a chairman capable of preventing investor relations turning sour over Sorrell's pay. This row has tended to fall into an awkward stand-off, with shareholders lumping what they see as Sorrell's excess rewards for fear that the company's entrepreneurial leader might suddenly quit, taking the share price down with him.
Where the role of chairman and chief executive is split, it works best as a partnership full of horizontality. But every chair needs to be ready to leave some distance from the CEO, and be the one to sack him or her. Quarta is well placed here, having little past contact with Sorrell. His task is to talk the language of horizontality - but from a great height.
