Growing Pains

The surviving handful of publicly owned agency-based companies have all now published their annual reports. As in most years, WPP’s is the most expansive and provocative. Perhaps CEO stands for chief essay officer, since the top guy uses the report as a soapbox for sharing his view, if not of the whole planet, at least of the biz-o-sphere.

And the picture for the year ahead isn’t very good. Normal cyclical problems, like excess inventories, are colliding with structural flaws (typified by overcapacity in such industries as automobiles, which can turn out 75 million vehicles a year for a world that needs 55 million), and the resulting kinks may take more than a year to untangle.