"Transferring successfully to the next generation means producing work that's as good as or better than the work of the first generation that founded the agency"
About this Quote
Merely surviving succession isn’t the bar; Jay Chiat is insisting on a harsher standard: prove you deserve to exist after the founders are gone. For an ad-world icon who helped turn Chiat/Day into a cultural engine, “transferring successfully” is almost a trollish understatement. He strips away the comforting family-business language of continuity and legacy and replaces it with performance. The second act is not custodianship; it’s a competitive audition.
The intent is managerial and moral at once. Chiat is warning that institutions calcify when they treat inheritance as entitlement. Founders get mythologized because they took risks, broke rules, and imprinted taste on the market. The next generation inherits the brand halo and the client roster, but those are exactly the conditions that breed caution. His benchmark—“as good as or better”—is a dare to refuse the easy path of preservation.
The subtext is about creative industries where “culture” is the product. Agencies don’t just sell ads; they sell a point of view. When that point of view becomes a template, it dies. Chiat’s line quietly frames leadership transition as a creative problem: can new leaders make work that feels inevitable in its own time, not reverent toward the last era’s greatest hits?
Context matters: late-20th-century advertising was professionalizing, consolidating, and becoming more risk-averse even as pop culture accelerated. Chiat’s quote reads like an antidote to corporate memory—an insistence that the only legitimate inheritance is the ability to outdo your heroes.
The intent is managerial and moral at once. Chiat is warning that institutions calcify when they treat inheritance as entitlement. Founders get mythologized because they took risks, broke rules, and imprinted taste on the market. The next generation inherits the brand halo and the client roster, but those are exactly the conditions that breed caution. His benchmark—“as good as or better”—is a dare to refuse the easy path of preservation.
The subtext is about creative industries where “culture” is the product. Agencies don’t just sell ads; they sell a point of view. When that point of view becomes a template, it dies. Chiat’s line quietly frames leadership transition as a creative problem: can new leaders make work that feels inevitable in its own time, not reverent toward the last era’s greatest hits?
Context matters: late-20th-century advertising was professionalizing, consolidating, and becoming more risk-averse even as pop culture accelerated. Chiat’s quote reads like an antidote to corporate memory—an insistence that the only legitimate inheritance is the ability to outdo your heroes.
Quote Details
| Topic | Leadership |
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