Here is the thing about a ten person marketing team that nobody who runs one will say out loud in a group like this

Here is the thing about a ten person marketing team that nobody who runs one will say out loud in a group like this.

The team is the liability as often as it is the asset. Because a ten person team needs managing. It needs structure, process, reporting, performance reviews, one-to-ones, hiring decisions, capability development. All of that is genuine work and it is work that has nothing to do with the commercial problem the team was assembled to solve.

The CMO who is also managing ten people is spending a third of their cognitive capacity on organisational maintenance rather than commercial systems thinking. And the organisations that are structurally outperforming them are not doing it with bigger teams. They are doing it with a smaller, sharper operating model and a person at the top who thinks about the system rather than the headcount.

The first question I ask when I look at a marketing function is not how many people are in it. It is what would happen if half of them were gone.