The first ninety days of a new CMO role follow a pattern so consistent that I have started to think of it less as a leadership approach and more as a gravitational pull.
Listening tour. Relationship building. Early diagnosis kept deliberately tentative. Then a structural observation, framed carefully, that leads to a reorganisation proposal. New reporting lines. An agency review. A fresh brief. Enough motion to demonstrate decisive action without yet being accountable for outcomes.
I am not describing poor leadership. I am describing what the role creates by the incentives it imposes. A new CMO with no established results needs to show progress. Reorganisation and agency change are the most visible available levers and they produce motion that looks like progress before the results come in.
The cost is that the real diagnosis, the one that sits underneath the org chart and the agency relationship, the one that lives in the commercial architecture itself, does not happen in those ninety days. And so by month six the same underlying constraint is running inside a new structure, and the clock that started on day one is now six months shorter.
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