Boards are beginning to ask a question about CMO appointments that they were not asking five years ago. Not whether the candidate has the right experience. Whether the role itself is the right structure for the commercial problem the business is trying to solve.
That question is arriving in boardrooms because the evidence of the last decade is producing a conclusion that is uncomfortable for the executive search industry and the CMO talent market simultaneously. The tenure data, the performance data, and the increasing frequency with which digital business revenue problems are being traced back to structural commercial architecture failures rather than individual leadership failures, are creating pressure on the assumption that appointing a CMO is the right first response to commercial underperformance.
The board that asks whether the role is right before asking who is right for the role is the board that has understood something about organisational design that the boards still recycling CMO appointments every twenty-two months have not yet reached.
The question is not a threat to the CMO as a human being or a profession. It is a recognition that the commercial system of a digital business at serious scale has outgrown the organisational model built to manage it. That recognition is the beginning of a more useful board conversation.
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