The most expensive hiring decision in a digital business is not the CMO who fails visibly. It is the CMO who succeeds well enough to stay while the structural problems compound underneath a performance that looks acceptable.
A CMO who is keeping the metrics within an acceptable range, managing the board narrative competently, and maintaining the agency relationships without political crisis, is producing a commercial situation that looks stable while the underlying architecture is drifting further from where it needs to be.
The structural problems, the measurement framework that is producing confident narrative rather than commercial intelligence, the incentive misalignment that is pulling the functions apart, the handoff gaps that are bleeding conversion at a rate nobody has calculated, continue running during a tenure that is politically stable enough to prevent the examination that would surface them.
The cost of a stable but structurally compromised CMO tenure is not visible in the quarterly review. It is visible in the commercial performance of the business three years later, when the compound effect of unmade decisions and unexamined architecture has produced a gap between where the business is and where it should be that takes significantly longer to close than it took to open.
Stability is not the same as progress. Make sure you know which one you have.
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