You were hired to fix something that was broken before you arrived. Nobody said that in the interview. But you knew it by the end of week two.
The brief was growth. The reality was a commercial system that had been patched and extended and explained so many times that the original logic underneath it was no longer visible to the people operating it. The reporting looked reasonable. The team was capable. The agency relationships were established. And the number you were hired to move was sitting exactly where it was when your predecessor left.
That is not a performance failure. That is what happens when the system is broken at a level below where the performance conversation is happening. The CMO who arrives into that situation is not inheriting a team. They are inheriting an archaeology project wearing a growth target.
The average CMO tenure in the UK is now under twenty-four months. That is not a coincidence. It is the mathematical consequence of accountability without the structural conditions for success. You cannot fix from inside what was built wrong from the start. Not without a read that goes deeper than the brief you were given on day one.
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