Why Transformation Is Harder Today

The Commercial Excellence Playbook has changed a lot in the past 8 years.

In 2018, the job focused on Digital Transformation, getting new systems installed and Agile processes up and running.

That was hard enough.

The job in 2026 is fundamentally different.

It’s not just "implementing" technology and processes anymore.

It’s changing how 500+ people actually work on Monday morning.

How they think, act, and make decisions. In an increasingly uncertain world.

You're also not running one major transformation, or set of strategic initiatives.

You're often running several simultaneously, in an organization that's already change-fatigued from the last three rounds of sweeping change.

Executive approval used to be the hard part, but now it's the easy one.

Passive resistance slows things down.

The consulting-training-software complex was designed for the 2018 version of this job. Strategy decks, capability workshops, PMOs, change management, and implementation timelines.

It produced reasonable results when the task was execution, but it wasn’t designed to:

• Build trust at scale • Sustain behavior change under pressure • Manage the cumulative weight of change fatigue across a workforce that's been through a decade of initiatives and has the pattern recognition to know most of them won't stick.

76% of transformations fail to create value. That's not a 2018 statistic, and the success rates are getting worse, not better.

The environment is harder, but the approach has stayed the same.

The gap between what the job requires and what the standard model produces is where transformation stalls or fails