David Gorodetski once imagined the usual romantic bargain: become a painter, accept the hunger, hope the pictures compensate for lunch. He had the eye for it. The appetite for the starving part was less certain. So he found a profession where images still carried consequence, where a line could clarify a thought and a composition could move a crowd. Graphic design led to advertising. Advertising opened into public relations. The canvas got larger, acquired deadlines, and began sending invoices.
It is tempting to call that a retreat from art. Gorodetski’s career reads more like an expansion of its territory. He has spent three decades arranging ideas so that other people can see them. At Sage Communications, the McLean agency he co-founded, those ideas often belong to government agencies, technology companies, nonprofits and civic institutions. The work sits in the difficult patch where a message must attract attention without outrunning the truth.
His own route to that patch was anything but tidy. Born and raised in Haifa, Israel, he completed mandatory military service and left for graduate school in New York intending to return home. An internship became a job. The job became a life in the United States. Somewhere along the way, a supposed detour acquired permanence.
An accent became an editing tool
Gorodetski earned a bachelor’s degree in communications design at WIZO Haifa Academy and an MFA in media studies at Parsons. Yet one of his sharper creative lessons came from language itself. English was not the language of his childhood, and he has spoken candidly about never feeling as fluent as he wished. The compensation was useful: simplify. Find the center. Notice which piece of an idea lets another person into it.
That instinct suited the early internet, when agencies were learning that the screen was not a brochure with electricity. At Stackig Advertising and Public Relations, Gorodetski built the Washington office’s interactive division from the ground up, adding web products and services to the agency’s offer. He later became vice president and worldwide head of Ogilvy Public Relations Interactive Creative Services, a title nearly long enough to need its own navigation bar.
The creative route · four useful turns
The large-agency years put him on international teams and major accounts. His work ranged across companies and public institutions, from Coca-Cola and MasterCard to federal agencies. For one Coca-Cola project, the company donated its historic commercial archive to the Library of Congress. Gorodetski’s team staged a live stream from the library floor, using a new medium to animate old advertising. The archive looked backward. The presentation did not.
A basement after the fault line
September 11 altered Gorodetski’s view of corporate life. The work at a publicly traded global agency had been demanding before; afterward, the larger question was whether the bargain still made sense. He felt there had to be more to life. In 2004, he and Larry Rosenfeld started Sage Communications in Gorodetski’s basement.
The partnership had history. Gorodetski had worked for Rosenfeld at Stackig and remembered him as the first person in the office and the last to leave. Rosenfeld supplied advice with no decorative frosting: get clients, because without clients there is no business. Smile when dealing with people. Do not export your stress. Gorodetski served as chief operating officer and executive creative director; Rosenfeld was CEO. One watched the commercial foundations while the other joined operations to creative work.
Sage grew in the Washington market through organic expansion and acquisitions. The geography mattered. Here, a campaign might need to understand procurement cycles, public missions, policy pressure and the difference between selling a product and earning trust around a government program. Gorodetski’s combination of visual clarity and institutional patience found an appropriate home.
When Rosenfeld retired in August 2021, Gorodetski became CEO. The founder now had the top title, but he resisted treating succession as permission to deliver a vision from a mountaintop. With president Julie Murphy, he met Sage employees in small groups, across levels, and listened for their needs. The next vision would be collective or it would be decoration.
“Knowing how to say ‘no’ is the secret sauce.”David Gorodetski, on early-career confidence
The valuable syllable
Gorodetski’s most portable management idea fits inside two letters: no. His version is not the petulant no, nor the executive no delivered from behind smoked glass. It is a reasoned stop. Perhaps the person needs help. Perhaps the answer is not known. Perhaps there is a concern that deserves daylight. To “own your no” is to explain the obstruction and accept responsibility for naming it.
That principle extends beyond staff conversations. Sage has evaluated prospective clients with a scorecard and declined work for conflicts or because the assignment was wrong for the firm. Gorodetski understands the seduction of professional storytelling. A talented communications team can make an argument attractive. His point is that the ability creates an obligation, not an exemption.
Years earlier, writing about social media, he made a related case against worshipping virality. A piece of content cannot be ordered to “go viral” with any reliable probability. A like may travel while producing no durable change. Begin instead with the action you want, map the route to it and measure the steps. The position sounds almost quaint in a culture of dashboards. It is also stubbornly practical.
Candor in an empty office
The pandemic tested every tidy leadership phrase. Gorodetski was in Philadelphia when events accelerated. Sage tried remote work and did not return to its former routine. Misinformation multiplied outside the company; uncertainty multiplied within it. He answered with all-hands meetings and a promise to tell employees what he knew as he learned it.
Military service had supplied an earlier lesson: in fear and uncertainty, slow down enough to avoid panic. Creative training supplied another: clear away noise until the important line is visible. He did not pretend that remote work was an uncomplicated gift. The company closed old gaps and found new resilience, while the casual contact among colleagues diminished. Good leaders, in his account, are permitted to describe both columns.
“I learned that vulnerability is a strength, not a weakness.”David Gorodetski, on toughness and empathy
That sentence carries extra weight from someone raised around military hierarchy and a culture he has described as tough. Vulnerability, for Gorodetski, is not confession as performance. It is the capacity to say the answer has not arrived, the plan needs revision or another person sees something you do not. Authority survives the admission. Sometimes it becomes believable because of it.
The civic side of the brief
Gorodetski’s public life around Washington has often moved through the arts. He has served for years with the DC Jazz Festival and received its John Conyers Jr. Jazz Advocacy Award in 2015. His board and council work has also included Leadership Greater Washington, Sitar Arts Center and Capital Fringe. These are revealing choices for a communications executive: jazz, theater, arts education and regional civic connection. Each depends on improvisation within a structure. Each requires an audience, but cannot be governed only by applause.
Sage’s community work follows the same thread. Its scholarship with Leadership Greater Washington supports students pursuing communications, graphic design, journalism, marketing and public relations. The third annual awards were presented in 2026. It is a modest intervention in a large industry, directed at the threshold where talent meets access.
There is a less ceremonial Gorodetski, too. He paints. He sails. He has raced cars and motorcycles. He enjoys jazz and describes himself as an aspiring stand-up comedian. In an old interview about office clothes, he declared black the rule for creatives, advised client teams to match their clients and told the digital group that color was not a bad thing. The joke has the structure of his serious advice: observe the room, understand your role, then leave yourself one small rebellion.
His eventual retirement plan is appropriately difficult. He wants to circumnavigate the world in a sailboat. Sailing is a persuasive hobby for someone in communications: you cannot argue the wind into changing, but you can read it, adjust and still choose a destination. The work is not command so much as alignment.
The line that remains
Gorodetski’s career has moved through several identities - designer, digital builder, global agency executive, operator, founder and CEO. The continuity is an artist’s suspicion of clutter. Reduce the idea. Tell the team what is known. Decline the wrong client. Do not confuse a burst of attention with a changed mind.
The painter survived after all. He is there in the blue-framed glasses, the interest in visual form, the impatience with unnecessary complication. He simply discovered that some compositions are made of people, institutions and choices. Their edges are harder to draw. Their consequences last longer.