# Commercial Excellence Consortium⁠™

> An invite-only peer community for Directors and VPs of Commercial Excellence,
> Strategy, Transformation and GTM Operations at $1B+ enterprises. The Consortium
> researches why enterprise transformation underdelivers and publishes what its
> members find. No vendors, no consultants, no pitches.

## Full text

- [llms-full.txt](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/llms-full.txt) — every published masterclass lesson in
  full: summary, definitions, all questions and answers, quotations, and complete
  transcripts. Fetch this if you want the subject matter rather than the map.

## What the Consortium argues

The failure mode in most transformation work is **passive resistance**: people nod
and agree in the meeting, then go back to what they were doing the next day. It is
social rather than instrumental — the failure is in the room, not in the reporting.

The Consortium's position is that this is a design problem rather than a people
problem. Programs undercut autonomy with top-down mandates, erode competence by
training without coaching, and break relatedness by disconnecting the work from the
people doing it. The proposed alternative is to build **adaptive capacity** — the
human capacity to absorb change — before rolling out systems and processes, and to
give people genuine ownership inside clear strategic boundaries.

Key terms used throughout: passive resistance; adaptive capacity; structured
autonomy; Adversity Quotient (AQ⁠®); GRIT⁠™; Mindset → Skillset → Toolset.

## Research and executive briefs

- [The AIRAS Method for Accelerating Transformation](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/read/airas) — flipbook reader and PDF download
- [How to Get Change to Actually Stick](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/read/how-to-get-change-to-actually-stick) — flipbook reader and PDF download
- [Enterprise Adaptation Is Not a Change Management Problem](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/read/enterprise-adaptation-is-not-a-change-management-problem) — flipbook reader and PDF download
- [Your People Are Not the Problem](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/read/your-people-are-not-the-problem) — flipbook reader and PDF download
- [The Transformation Architect](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/read/the-transformation-architect) — flipbook reader and PDF download
- [The Capability Illusion](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/read/the-capability-illusion) — flipbook reader and PDF download
- [The State of GEO in B2B Marketing — 2026 Edition](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/read/state-of-geo-2026) — flipbook reader and PDF download
- [The State of GEO in B2B Marketing, 2026 Edition](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/read/state-of-geo-2026) — research report, 225 qualified B2B marketing and revenue leaders
- [LANXESS ComEx Academy case study](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/read/lanxess-case-study) — mid-eight-figure EBITDA impact over 18 months
- [All briefs and reports](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/ideas)

## Executive roundtables

Monthly 90-minute peer sessions under the Chatham House Rule. Sessions are
recorded; each page gives the recap, the room, and the recording.

### How a roundtable runs

- **Format.** 90 minutes on Zoom, monthly, 15–25 senior operators per session.
  No presentations, no slide decks, no product demos, no vendor panels.
- **How it opens.** A round of introductions — name, title, company, location —
  then straight into a real problem a member is navigating. A practitioner guest
  who has already solved that problem sometimes anchors the discussion.
- **What participants are asked for.** Lived experience rather than theory: what
  they are experimenting with, what is working, and what is still a challenge.
  Sessions are run on the premise that nobody present has the whole thing solved,
  so naming an unsolved problem is as useful as naming a solution.
- **The Chatham House Rule.** Participants may use what they hear; they may not
  attribute it. Published recaps therefore describe deployments by role and
  industry rather than by company, and name people only where the room agreed.
- **After the session.** A written recap and the recording are published to the
  session page and to LinkedIn. Members connect one-to-one directly afterward.
- **Who attends.** Directors, VPs, and Heads of Commercial Excellence, Strategy,
  Transformation, and GTM Operations at $1B+ enterprises. Attendance is by
  invitation and peer referral. Consultants, SaaS vendors, and service providers
  are excluded, and this is enforced.

### [AI's Impact on Marketing](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/roundtables/ai-impact-on-marketing)
July 15, 2026 · 84 min

An open exchange on where AI is landing in commercial and marketing teams — the real blockers, the use cases delivering today, and what separates a pilot that scales from one that stalls.

Practices from this session:
- Lead with the user's pain, not the tool. The pilots that stuck removed work people already hated — writing visit reports, building forecasts, combing competitor filings.
- Provide sanctioned tools and the training to use them. A locked-down free tool with no guidance pushes sensitive work into personal accounts, which puts more IP at risk rather than less.
- Draw the line between forward-facing and proprietary up front. That single distinction decides whether a project runs fast or crawls.
- Fix the process before you automate it. AI accelerates a broken process as readily as a good one.
- Separate personal productivity from enterprise transformation. The first needs low-code tooling; the second needs guardrails and a cost model.
- Keep a human in the loop. SME validation, editable output, and explicit go/no-go gates are what turn skeptics into adopters.
- Start answer-engine optimization now. Being the brand an AI model recommends is a six-to-eighteen-month build, and few teams own it yet.

Questions this session answers:
- **How do you get past the fear of proprietary IP leaking into a public model?** Draw the line up front between what is forward-facing and what is proprietary. Several leaders said that single distinction is what decides whether a project runs fast or crawls. The alternative — a restricted free tool handed out with no training — pushes people to use their own accounts, which puts more IP at risk rather than less.
- **Who should run the early AI experiments?** One manufacturer stood up a small spearhead group of AI-savvy people positioned close to the data-science team, so experimenters knew which tools were sanctioned and which data was fair game. Formal training for managers followed about three months later, once there were real use cases to train on.
- **What does an “AI fluent” mandate get wrong?** Left undefined, it invites twenty business units to build twenty versions of the same thing — twenty quoting systems with no shared pricing guardrails. The fix the room landed on was to separate personal productivity, which suits low-code Copilot-style tooling, from enterprise transformation, which needs guardrails, shared logic, and a scalability plan.
- **Why do AI projects fail?** The room's answer was process, not technology. Integrate AI into a dysfunctional process and it accelerates the dysfunction. One leader put the failure rate at roughly 95% when AI is bolted onto a broken process.
- **How do you get sales reps to adopt an AI tool?** Give them the win first. A visit-report agent that interviews reps after a call and writes the report into CRM drew no refusals in a thirty-person pilot, and a waiting list formed to join it. By contrast, a next-best-action engine offering only accept-or-reject was ignored until a modify option was added — the edit delivered value to the rep and fed the model at the same time.
- **What does AI cost once it scales?** More than the pilot suggests. One leader described an employee-built Outlook bot running at about €400 a week to do something a free mail rule could handle. Token consumption is an OPEX line, and it grows with adoption rather than shrinking.
- **What is the risk with homegrown agents?** Key-person risk. Several teams have capable agents built on two-page prompts refined by one person. If that person leaves, the tool breaks and the team has little way to repair it. The open question is whether to build your own as a stepping stone or buy enterprise-grade at higher cost.
- **What is answer-engine optimization, and why should commercial excellence care?** Most AI effort today sits on the low ground — CRM, customer research, content production. The high ground is being the brand a model recommends when a buyer, or a procurement team weighing a multi-million-dollar tender, asks who is best in the category. The play is to run it in parallel with internal AI work: engineer content for the machine layer so it is clean and indexable, and build authority through co-published research and credible media. Only a handful of the companies in the room had a team on it.

### [Horizontal Learning: How Peers Change Behavior Where Top-Down Training Can't](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/roundtables/horizontal-learning)
June 10, 2026 · 60 min · Guest: Vicente Pascual, Global Director of Commercial Excellence, Owens Corning / OCF

A global commercial excellence director opens with his own failures — top-down rollouts of an off-the-shelf framework — and walks through the peer-led alternative he built in their place.

Practices from this session:
- Manufacture the felt need first. Put people in front of a real, current problem and let them struggle with it before you hand over any framework.
- Use a case someone in the room brought that day, rather than one written for a different organization.
- Give your most experienced skeptics an observer or coach role. It acknowledges their expertise and hands them a purpose.
- Assign someone to capture the moments of struggle and insight, then debrief them to the whole group so one group’s breakthrough becomes everyone’s.
- Tap respected internal performers to teach, and identify your multipliers before the trainer leaves.
- Have leaders coach on real customer visits — observing rather than overshadowing, and guiding back to the framework.
- Close each program with one to three specific commitments per person, written into the development plan and observed by their leader against a timeframe.

Questions this session answers:
- **Why does corporate training fail to change behavior?** Two failure modes came up. Too little time up front customizing to the organization’s actual maturity and needs, so the program answers problems it does not have. And almost no on-the-job coaching afterward, so people revert to old habits within months. The concepts are usually sound — the delivery treats them as a rollout rather than a practice.
- **What is horizontal learning?** A peer-driven, practice-based alternative to top-down instruction. Participants work real cases, role-play them, observe each other, and debrief as a group. The richest insight comes from peers rather than the instructor, which turns each participant from a consumer of training into a co-owner of it.
- **How do you get people to want to learn?** Create the need before you teach. Put them in front of a real, current problem and let them struggle with it, and hand over the framework only after the attempt. Telling a professional with thirty years in the job that you are going to teach them how it is done loses them immediately.
- **How do you handle experienced people who think they have nothing left to learn?** Give them a role. Recast the most experienced skeptics as observers or coaches and ask them to give feedback to their peers. It acknowledges their expertise, hands them a purpose, and takes the weight off the trainer to be the only source of insight in the room.
- **Why does role-play work when so many people dislike it?** It exposes the gap between knowing and doing. As the session’s moderator put it: “just because you know something doesn’t mean you can do it; just because you can do something doesn’t mean you will do it.” Role-play is where that gap becomes visible, including to the people who dread it.
- **How do you make learning last after the program ends?** Wire it to performance. Ask each person to commit to one to three specific changes, align them with their leader, write them into the development plan, and have the leader observe against a defined timeframe. Without that, people revert to the day job.
- **Should you use internal experts or external trainers?** The room leaned internal, or at least both. Respected internal performers already have followership and know the nuances of the job, which is often where the problems sit. The caution raised: a strong performer is not automatically a good trainer — showing what you do is still knowledge transfer, and coaching is what lets someone see themselves in action and adjust.
- **How do you spread the practice beyond the training room?** Identify your multipliers before the trainer leaves. Groups that kept going started applying the techniques on their own, asking a colleague to help sharpen a pitch before a meeting. Leaders extend it by coaching on real customer visits — observing rather than overshadowing, and guiding back to the framework.

### [Agentic AI Workflows](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/roundtables/agentic-ai-workflows)
April 28, 2026 · 92 min

A live poll opened the session and set its tone: few above a three, zero votes at five. What followed was ninety minutes on why the bottleneck is the coalition rather than the technology.

Practices from this session:
- Settle the definition before the design debate. Until business and IT agree what agentic means for your organization, scope arguments burn time without producing scope.
- Reach for deterministic automation whenever an agent is not strictly required. Agents consume tokens, and tokens are an operating cost that grows with use.
- Start at Assist. Individual-productivity wins build the confidence and the prompt skill that the later stages depend on.
- Get IT, commercial, supply chain, and finance at one table to define the job to be done before anyone picks a tool.
- Audit what you already own. Most mid-to-large-cap companies run their existing stacks at roughly ten percent of capacity.
- Build the platform before the fleet: sandboxing, token monitoring, access control, connectors, and a way to maintain agents over time.
- Stay model-agnostic. Different providers lead on different tasks, and the leader changes often.
- Keep a human in the loop on your largest accounts, whatever the automation can do across the long tail.

Questions this session answers:
- **What is agentic AI, and how is it different from a chatbot?** The analogy the room liked: regular AI is the chatbot you ask how to make a recipe; agentic AI does the cooking, buys what needs buying, checks the fridge, and plates it. The sharper technical line drawn in the session was generative AI plus execution — and because execution consumes tokens, an agent is only the right answer where deterministic automation would not do the job.
- **How much agentic AI are large enterprises running today?** A live poll of thirty senior executives asked exactly that on a 0–5 scale. Zero votes at five, eleven percent at four, a third at three, and the rest at one or two. This was a room of advanced practitioners, so the honest answer is that very little real agentic execution is in production, whatever the volume of noise suggests.
- **Why do agentic AI projects stall?** The room’s answer was the coalition rather than the technology. Most mid-to-large-cap companies already run AWS, Microsoft, and Salesforce stacks at roughly ten percent of capacity. What is missing is IT, commercial, supply chain, and finance leaders at one table long enough to define the job to be done before anyone picks a tool.
- **What are the stages of agentic AI maturity?** Three. Assist: trigger an automated email when a contract hits ninety days from renewal — low governance, individual productivity, builds confidence. Process enhancement: the same trigger, with retrieval pulling service transcripts, billing history, and account context into the decision first. Enterprise advantage: event-condition-action workflows on unified data, where the trigger checks margin tier and supply-chain status and routes to the right human with the right play. Most enterprises try to leapfrog the first two and fail at the third.
- **Should you use an agent or ordinary automation?** Agents earn their keep where context has to be understood and probabilistic correction is required — master-data correction at high confidence, for example. Everything else is cheaper and more predictable as deterministic automation. Treating agents as a general-purpose replacement for automation is expensive, and the cost scales with adoption.
- **Why build an agent platform rather than individual agents?** Governance, sandboxing, token monitoring, access control, and the ability to maintain agents over time. One team is building an LLM-agnostic platform with connectors to CRM, marketing automation, the data layer, and email, plus an internal surface they describe as an app store but for agents. Without that scaffolding you get agents appearing across the company that few teams can maintain.
- **How do you talk to a leadership team about AI without launching another transformation program?** Lead with the job to be done rather than the technology, and frame AI as an accelerator of the business strategy rather than a strategy of its own. As one leader put it, his company has no AI strategy — it has a business strategy, and asks how agentic AI accelerates it. Defining separate lanes with their own governance, for personal productivity, operational excellence, and sales growth, is what keeps the ambition from turning into sprawl.
- **How do you get bottom-up momentum rather than another top-down rollout?** The most concrete pattern in the room was fifty-two Growth Projects run over a year: bottom-up problem definition, external operator-coaches assigned, cross-business-unit teams, ninety-day scope with a defined end goal, and leadership acting as a blocker-removal layer rather than the initiator. Several have since been scaled into corporate solutions.

### [Structured Autonomy: The Design Principle That Eliminates Passive Resistance](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/roundtables/structured-autonomy)
March 31, 2026 · 90 min · Guest: Veronika Sauer, SVP Business Development, Constantia Flexibles

Senior leaders from chemicals, pharma, medical devices, FMCG, industrial manufacturing, robotics, biotech services, and enterprise IT on what structured autonomy means in practice — and why the hardest part of it is letting go.

Practices from this session:
- Define the destination and the why with precision, set the guardrails, and leave the how to the team.
- Let teams pick their own priorities. Ask each to choose the three capabilities that matter most to their targets rather than selecting centrally.
- Scope the work as ninety-day projects the team defines itself, rooted in friction they experience daily.
- Use coaches who have run a P&L, not career coaches. The credibility is the point.
- Mix the groups deliberately — senior leaders beside frontline sellers, sales with marketing, regions blended.
- Have each team present to the senior operating committee, so blockers surface where someone can remove them.
- Track leading indicators — projects launched, blockers resolved, participation quality — so leadership has evidence before EBITDA moves.
- Recalibrate to maturity. A mature enterprise usually needs to loosen; a growth-stage company usually needs foundational process first.

Questions this session answers:
- **What is structured autonomy?** Providing clarity on the why and the intended impact, defining guardrails, and then giving teams full ownership of how they get there. It is not the absence of direction and it is not a free-for-all — it is a deliberate leadership act that sets boundaries clearly enough for people to move freely inside them. One participant framed it as defining the size and shape of the playground and leaving which toys get used, in what order, to the people in it.
- **Why do top-down transformation programs fail to change behavior?** They cascade solutions designed centrally to problems the receiving teams may not have. Feedback scores are strong and intellectual agreement is broad, and then on Monday nothing changes. As one participant put it, bringing frameworks and tools to people who did not ask for them generates passive resistance to adopting them.
- **How should you decide which capabilities to build?** Let the teams decide. One European chemicals company mapped roughly forty capabilities across four families, then asked each team to choose the three that mattered most to their own targets and their own day — on the reasoning that the center knows less about what a team faces at its customers than the team does.
- **What is a Growth Project?** A ninety-day project a team of two or three defines for itself around a capability and a business problem it cares about, supported by an experienced operator-coach and presented to the senior leadership operating committee at the end. Quote turnaround time, pricing inconsistency — the projects come from where the team feels friction, not from a central plan.
- **Why do leaders resist giving teams autonomy?** Fear of losing control. When teams choose their own priorities you genuinely do not know what they will choose, and when they define their own projects they may solve problems in ways you would have designed differently. That uncertainty is uncomfortable for leaders trained and rewarded for having the answers. The room also noted that autonomy is set less by policy than by what leaders tolerate and how they behave informally.
- **Does structured autonomy mean giving more freedom?** Not necessarily — it depends on maturity. Large, mature companies often have too much structure and need to loosen. Mid-market companies actively want playbooks and standardization. Growth-stage companies already have autonomy and need foundational process first. The same is true across markets inside one multinational.
- **How do you show impact before the P&L moves?** Separate leading from lagging indicators. EBITDA improvement is the lagging one and it arrives later than most sponsors' patience. Along the way, measure Growth Projects launched, capability self-assessments completed, systemic blockers escalated and resolved, and engagement quality. Without leading indicators, programs get dismantled before they have had time to produce what they were designed to produce.
- **How do you apply structured autonomy to data and reporting?** Protect a common core centrally and let everything else flex. The core is smaller than most people assume — customer, product, vendor, chart-of-accounts master, sales order detail, sales rep activity — and once it is consistent you can compare one market against another. Local requirements stay local, and teams clip their own reporting onto the core. Two failure modes came up: IT maintaining data it does not own, and designing only for what the executive wants to see rather than what the frontline needs.
- **What kind of coach does this need?** Operators rather than career coaches or management consultants — people who have run a P&L, led commercial functions, and navigated large-company politics and bureaucracy. The coaching is team-based and project-driven rather than individual and content-driven.

### [Eliminating Passive Resistance in Corporate Transformations](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/roundtables/eliminating-passive-resistance)
February 24, 2026 · 93 min · Guest: Ron Denoo, Operator Coach; Roy van Griensven, Operator-Coach-in-Residence

Ninety minutes, fifteen countries, and no slides. Operators talking to operators about the thing that kills most transformation efforts before they start: passive resistance.

Practices from this session:
- Set direction top-down; design execution bottom-up. The people doing the work generally know what to do.
- Run a pre-mortem, not a post-mortem. Ask frontline teams what will make this fail — before launch.
- Bring the known resistors in early and ask them why it will not work. They become the ambassadors.
- Put quick wins into milestone planning at the start. Early adopters become change agents without being asked.
- Fund change management at ten percent of project budget. Below five percent is trouble.
- Stop calling it transformation. Continuous improvement implies what exists has value and can be built on.

Questions this session answers:
- **What is passive resistance?** People nod and agree in the meeting, then go back to what they were doing the next day. It is social rather than instrumental — the failure shows up in the room, not in a report. The room’s position was that it is a symptom rather than the problem: a failure of design, communication, and empathy upstream of it.
- **Why do enterprise transformations fail so often?** McKinsey puts the failure rate at seventy percent. BCG reports that only one in four transformations deliver sustained value-creating change. Bain has cited numbers as high as eighty-eight percent. The room’s explanation was design rather than people — transformation done to people instead of with them, and strategy treated as a deliverable instead of a conversation.
- **Why do people resist change?** Rarely the change itself, and more often what they stand to lose by it: autonomy, responsibilities, status, relationships with stakeholders they value, and the reason they do the job at all. One participant noted how little time gets spent up front mapping who will be affected and how.
- **How should you handle the people you know will resist?** Bring them in early and ask them why it will not work. Executives in the room described known resistors becoming the program’s most effective ambassadors once their objections were sought out rather than managed around.
- **How much of a project budget should go to change management?** The room’s rule of thumb was ten percent of project budget. Below five percent was described as trouble.
- **Should transformation be designed top-down or bottom-up?** Both, in different places. Set direction top-down; design execution bottom-up. The people doing the work generally know what to do, and the open question raised in the room was whether leadership has the courage to let them.
- **What is a pre-mortem, and why run one?** Ask frontline teams what will make this fail — before launch rather than after. It surfaces the operational objections that a post-mortem can only record.
- **Should you call it a transformation?** Several leaders said no. Transformation implies that what exists has no value and that the change has an end date. Continuous improvement implies what exists has value and can be built on, and that adaptation is normal.

### [Enterprise Adaptation](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/roundtables/enterprise-adaptation)
January 21, 2026 · 94 min · Guest: Jeevan Satishkumar, Josep Sitjes

Eighteen commercial leaders on where resistance really comes from — and the argument that the change-management paradigm is itself what produces it.

Practices from this session:
- Ask which capability, if the team got really good at it, would make everything else easier. They know where the bottleneck is.
- Strike the reciprocal deal up front: you choose your own problem to solve, and in exchange you give the changes you did not choose an open mind.
- Take something off the plate before adding to it. Where the strategy is already clear, the constraint is capacity.
- Consult before you design, not after. Being asked late reads as being told, and the objection that follows is emotional rather than practical.
- Earn the right to challenge by over-investing in support first, and start from what a team already does well.
- Give the field something back for what you ask it to enter. A system that only reports upward teaches people that reporting is the job.
- Fix the process before buying the tool. Software applied to a broken process makes the breakage faster.
- Equip sales managers to coach, and coach them on coaching. Training transfers information; reinforcement is what changes behavior.

Questions this session answers:
- **Why do people resist change at work?** This room named six causes, and disagreement with the change barely featured: passive resistance from having no investment in it; capacity rather than clarity, where the strategy is understood but there is nothing left to give; ego, from not being consulted on the design; attachment to whatever exists now; the comfort zone and fear of visible failure; and fatigue from change layered on change. The underlying point is that resistance is a symptom of how change is introduced.
- **What is passive resistance?** People nod and agree in the meeting, then go back to what they were doing the next day. No colleague argues with you — they simply have no investment in it, so the training plays on one screen while the real work happens on another. It is social rather than instrumental, and it is the most common form.
- **Are some kinds of resistance easier to work with than others?** Yes, and the ranking is counterintuitive. Aggressive resistance is the most workable — it creates useful tension and can be turned with clarity and involvement. Passive resistance is harder because there is nothing to engage with. Actively toxic resistance is the one that has to be dealt with directly and early.
- **How many people are genuinely good at change?** Fewer than most transformation plans assume. In a McKinsey Health Institute study of thirty thousand people, 23% rated themselves both resilient and adaptable — so roughly eight in ten do not think of themselves as good at change. Around one company in six invests in building that capacity. The people designing transformation are unusually adaptable by selection, and tend to project that onto everyone else.
- **What does it mean to pull adaptation out rather than push change in?** Stop designing solutions for people and start facilitating people to design their own. It begins by letting a group say out loud that there is too much change and too little time, then asking which capability, if they got really good at it, would make everything else easier. Teams answer accurately, because they already know where the bottleneck is.
- **How do you get a team to accept a change it had no say in?** Trade for it explicitly. In the one program in this room that had done it at scale, each person picked a problem they cared about and designed the fix — and agreed in exchange to give an open mind to solutions arriving from elsewhere. Ninety days of autonomy on one slice bought openness on the rest. More than 300 leaders, mid-eight-figure EBITDA impact in a year, and no meaningful resistance.
- **How do you earn the right to tell an experienced team to work differently?** Commercial excellence has two jobs and they are not equal: support is expected of you, and the right to challenge has to be earned. That means over-investing in the support half first, treating the sales organization as an internal customer, starting from what a team already does well rather than from the gap, and being explicit about what a project will not cover rather than promising everything.
- **Why do sales teams stop using the systems you give them?** Usually because the system asks and gives nothing back. Competitive intelligence goes up so headquarters can see the whole region, and the person who entered it seldom gets a view in return. People adopt the apps on their phones because those make life easier, and they judge internal tools by the same standard.
- **What is the difference between training and coaching?** Training transfers information. Skill comes from practice, failure, and another attempt — few people learn a backflip in a weekend workshop. The reinforcement has to sit with the sales manager, who is close enough to observe the work and senior enough for the feedback to land. Ask managers whether they would coach more given the time and they all say yes; none of them have the time, which makes it a design problem rather than a willingness problem.

### [2025 ComEx Lessons Learned](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/roundtables/2025-comex-lessons-learned)
December 2025 · 82 min

The year-end session. Where AI moved past meeting summaries into something a competitor lacks, why a pivot from margin to growth reaches further than anyone expects, and the year's most-agreed lesson: training is not enablement.

Practices from this session:
- Separate adoption from adaptation. Using a chatbot as a search engine is adoption; changing how the work gets done means stopping the previous way of doing it.
- Judge an AI use case by whether the output exists anywhere else. Time saved is replicable by any competitor; insight drawn from data only you own is not.
- Point it at the unread data you already have. Years of sales visit reports contain market insight few competitors can assemble.
- Write digital adoption into the sales management standards, and start with first-line managers — execution either happens or stops at that layer.
- Subscribe on behalf of the company rather than permitting consumer tools. A sanctioned environment is what makes internal information usable.
- Set guardrails by data type, not by policy in general. Owned data behind your own firewall invites more input; regulated data needs named gatekeepers.
- Treat a pivot from margin to growth as a rebuild: KPIs, segmentation, risk profile, deal rules, the customer story, and the incentive plan.
- Sequence the changes. Resources are finite and each one lands on something another change is already moving.
- Build the coalition around whoever the work has to pass through — often not the sponsor you assumed — and keep the plan ready until a real reason to act appears.
- Replace training with role modeling, guided discovery and staying with people while they build confidence.
- Map worst-case tariff exposure, stand up an office spanning finance, project management, sales and legal, and read the escalation clauses before the increase lands.

Questions this session answers:
- **What is the difference between AI adoption and AI adaptation?** Adoption is having the tool and using it in place of something familiar — a chatbot standing in for a search engine. Adaptation means the way the work gets done has changed, which requires stopping the previous method rather than running both. Most of the room placed itself in the first category and said so openly.
- **What separates an AI use case that creates value from one that only saves time?** Whether the output exists anywhere else. Meeting summaries and drafted emails produce a personal efficiency any competitor can replicate this afternoon. Synthesizing your own sales visit reports into market insight produces something competitors have no route to, because they do not have the underlying visits.
- **How can AI turn sales visit reports into a commercial advantage?** One participant's region files roughly four visit reports per seller per week across three to four hundred sellers — tens of thousands of data points a year, fragmented and unread. Each report contains observations about market clusters, customer trends and innovation trends. Consolidated in one place and synthesized, they became proprietary insight the company takes back to its customers, in a B2B setting where point-of-sale data does not exist.
- **Can AI shorten an innovation cycle?** One participant set the target at removing ninety percent of the time between an idea and a tangible concept, against an eighteen-to-twenty-four-month baseline. Pairing a tool that scrapes the web against industry keywords with market visits and a customer brainstorm, a facilitated session now runs from an idea to a pictured concept with a full recipe inside the same meeting.
- **How should a company set AI guardrails?** By data type rather than as a single policy. Where the data is owned and sits behind the company's own firewall, the problem can invert — one participant wanted more information going in, not less. Where the data is regulated, protected health information being the example given, it takes named gatekeepers, defined processes and training to keep it out of publicly accessible models. In both cases, a company-provided secure environment is what makes internal use possible, since consumer tools are available to people anyway.
- **Why does digital adoption stall in sales teams?** One head of commercial excellence ran five whys on it and reached an unglamorous answer: people could not be bothered, or entered rubbish to make the requirement go away. The fix she landed on was to define digital adoption inside the sales management standards for both reps and first-line managers, on the reasoning that if the first-line manager treats the tool as optional, everyone below that layer will too.
- **What does a pivot from margin optimization to revenue growth require?** More than most people expect. New KPIs, because the existing ones were built to guide margin decisions. New analysis and segmentation, because growth pockets sit outside the zone of comfort. A different risk profile for markets the company had avoided. New rules of engagement, including price levels it had declined before and a story for the customer explaining why, without contaminating the rest of the portfolio. And a completely rethought sales incentive plan.
- **Why do broad transformation programs stall?** On arithmetic more than resistance. Pricing, planning, pipeline management, CRM and portfolio pushed at once run into finite resources, and each change lands on something another change is already moving. The room's related self-diagnosis was over-engineering — hundreds of bespoke KPIs and layers on layers of process, with the front line paying for it in time away from customers.
- **How do you get a change through an organization where each region works differently?** One supply chain leader unified regional planning by finding the person the work had to pass through — not the IT sponsor he assumed, but a purchasing VP the tenders went through — then co-creating the governance board with the people who would sit on it, and keeping the plan ready until a delayed investment request supplied the urgency. The result was one tender and one implementation across all regions.
- **When should a global company standardize, and when should it stay regional?** One participant with eighteen European markets at different levels of technology maturity found that global harmonization on each of those decisions would have meant waiting years. The workable split was a global strategy and direction with regional flexibility underneath, standardizing the core data so it is available everywhere and allowing local additions on top. The counterweight is funding: a company can afford to invest once rather than seventeen times, which makes capturing local innovation and delivering it back out worth the effort.
- **Why does training fail to produce adoption?** Because a training session ends and little of it gets put into practice. What the room agreed on instead was role modeling and leading from the front, staying with people through the first application, understanding why someone would be motivated to accept the new tool at all, and staying with them until they have the confidence to apply it unsupervised. Formal change management — stakeholder maps and a communications deck — was described as a large waste of money by comparison.
- **How should a commercial organization handle continuing tariff volatility?** Map the worst case so the downside is a plan rather than a rolling argument. Map the financial and goods flows, noting that a flow product with a short order-to-cash cycle behaves differently from a backlog product priced now and invoiced a year later. Stand up an office spanning finance, project management, sales and legal. Read the contracts for escalation clauses before the increase arrives. And set a dated milestone by which the impact is fully mitigated.
- **Can tariffs be an opportunity?** The work they force — tracing supply chains, mapping goods and financial flows, centralizing what had been handled locally — is analysis most companies had been postponing, and the visibility outlasts the tariff that prompted it. One caution from the room, learned the hard way: do not assume competitors and other players in the chain will respond the way you would.

### [Building a 'Next Gen' ComEx Academy](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/roundtables/next-gen-comex-academy)
November 11, 2025 · 41 min · Guest: Roy van Griensven, Head of Commercial Excellence, LANXESS

Commercial Excellence leaders from manufacturing, chemicals, life sciences, and consumer goods gathered to explore what it takes to build capability at scale.

Practices from this session:
- Ask better questions. Open each initiative with: which capability, if improved in the next 90 days, would move our results the most?
- Integrate learning with doing. Structure 90-day Growth Projects⁠™ that produce tangible results while building skill and confidence.
- Engage credible coaches. Use experienced operators who can guide teams through practical challenges, not just deliver content.
- Measure what matters. Focus on a few leading indicators tied to outcomes that finance and leadership can validate.
- Model humility and curiosity. Reward learning, acknowledge effort, and make it safe to take ownership up and down the organization.

Questions this session answers:
- **What is the hardest part of building commercial capability at scale?** The room ranked seven barriers. Building intrinsic motivation and managing change fatigue tied at the top at 5.25 out of 6, with showing business impact close behind at 5.13. Getting budget approved ranked near the bottom — the binding constraint is belief and bandwidth rather than money.
- **How do you get business units to own a capability program rather than comply with it?** Ask each unit a single question: what matters most for you to deliver your plan this year? That answer becomes their first capability to build. Ownership starts at the beginning, and engagement replaces resistance.
- **What replaces classroom training?** A rhythm of Inspire, Reflect, Apply. Teams work 90-day Growth Projects tied directly to their business goals, each supported by an experienced operator-coach who guides reflection, problem-solving, and action planning against real challenges.
- **How do you prove a capability program delivered?** Decentralize control and centralize evidence. Headquarters stopped dictating process and focused on evidence of impact, with each business unit tracking its own results and finance validating them. In its first year the LANXESS Academy delivered mid-eight-figure measurable improvement, twenty percent above plan.
- **Why does change fatigue set in?** The room framed it as identity rather than pace. When the way we work keeps changing, people begin to wonder whether what made them successful still counts.
- **Who drives change in a large organization?** The middle. Mid-level leaders and front-line managers translate strategy into action, and when they buy in the rest of the organization tends to follow.
- **Is “transformation” still the right word?** The group thought not. Transformation sounds like something that ends. The work is building adaptability into how the organization operates, so that change becomes normal rather than exceptional.

### [Future-Proofing for the Age of AI](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/roundtables/future-proofing-for-the-age-of-ai)
October 22, 2025 · 62 min

The Consortium's launch session: what future-proofing means when you have to act on it, why this wave of technology met so little resistance, and the gap between how exciting AI is and how much it has changed anyone's commercial model.

Practices from this session:
- Define future-proofing as a capability question: which processes, data, competencies and systems are needed to win, and which are missing today.
- Build the picture at several horizons — the market, the industry, the forces pushing on you — then locate the collisions and the openings before writing the roadmap.
- Run the exercise in both directions. Forward from today inherits today's assumptions; backcasting from a distant horizon does not, and the disagreement between them is the finding.
- Use scenario planning instead of chasing consensus. Build several futures and fund the moves they have in common.
- Expect a different reception when AI moves from assisting to recommending. A pricing recommendation reads as a verdict on someone's expertise in a way a summary does not.
- Separate the structural question from the individual one. Integrating AI into the CRM settles nothing about whether a given rep uses it.
- Start with training use cases — role plays and competitor analysis produce results with small tools and little investment.
- Judge a use case by whether it unlocks action that would otherwise go untaken, rather than by the time it saves.
- Make the case to sellers in terms of their own day. In technical industries the pitch is that it makes you look brilliant in seconds, not that it improves company data.
- Hire the mavericks who will find the use cases, and let the capability spread from the people who have it.
- Expect the technology to level the technical playing field rather than tilt it. Once competitors have the same tools, judgment becomes the differentiator.
- Close the governance gap early. Where policy lags adoption, individual judgment fills the space.

Questions this session answers:
- **What does future-proofing mean in a commercial context?** Building a picture of the environment at several horizons — market, industry, and the forces pushing on the business — locating where the collisions and openings are, then assessing honestly what the organization needs to become in size, shape, skills and capability, and writing the roadmap that closes the distance. One participant's shorthand: meet the puck where it is going, rather than where you are now. The alternative is reactionary, which is panic fixing a future that has already arrived.
- **Which capabilities does future-proofing refer to?** Process, data, people competencies and systems. The market question is where to play; this is the internal half of the same exercise, and the half more often skipped. A head of commercial excellence in specialty chemicals reduced the whole term to one line: building the capabilities to win in future.
- **Should you plan forward from today or backward from a future date?** Both, as separate streams. Forward from today is a rational extrapolation and inherits today's assumptions along with today's constraints. Backcasting — starting ten years out, imagining the state fully and working back to what must begin now — starts with imagination and produces a materially different answer. Running both and examining where they disagree is more informative than either alone.
- **How do you get a leadership team to agree on one view of the future?** The room questioned whether that is the right goal. Consensus on a single scenario is hard to reach and fragile once reached. Scenario planning replaces it: build several futures and fund what they have in common, which gives you the moves worth making regardless of which one arrives.
- **What does Commercial Excellence Consortium membership include?** A monthly roundtable capped small enough that everyone speaks, a member directory and group for contacting peers directly, benchmarking studies and member case studies, peer mentorship with introductions made on request, and a podcast built around members. Membership is invite-only and free, follows peer referral, and excludes vendors, sponsors and consultants working the room.
- **Why has AI met less resistance than earlier digital transformations?** Because the current wave assists rather than decides. Chatbots and agents help someone do what they already do, faster, and nothing about that challenges their judgment. One participant expected a different reception once the technology starts recommending action — telling a commercial team what to offer on price is a verdict on their expertise in a way a meeting summary is not.
- **How does a heavily regulated company adopt AI?** One global commercial excellence leader in pharma described compliance being present at each step and the company embracing it regardless, because a lean organization with ambitious goals has little alternative. Her framing was that it is a matter of necessity rather than of when or if. Seven AI projects were running inside her commercial excellence function alone.
- **What is the difference between structural and individual AI adoption?** The structural question is how AI gets integrated into the systems people already work in — next best action inside the CRM, and the workflow around it. The individual question is whether a given rep or manager personally uses it, which no amount of system integration settles. Treating them as one problem is why adoption numbers disappoint.
- **What are the easiest AI wins in a commercial organization?** Training was the ground several participants found most productive: role plays, competitor analysis and practice conversations, which work with small tools and little investment and suit how newer joiners prefer to learn. Beyond that, participants reported call report summarization and pipeline prediction against historical patterns.
- **How do you tell whether an AI use case is worth pursuing?** Ask whether it unlocks action that would otherwise go untaken, rather than what it saves. Two examples from the room: global customer reports that few had the capacity to assemble, now driving global decisions that were previously not being made; and portfolio alerts to salespeople when a buying or payment pattern shifts, which produce a call that would otherwise not have happened.
- **How do you get sellers to use AI?** Make the case in terms of their own day. One participant noted that sellers see the job as visiting customers and having conversations, and that sales teams are seldom early adopters of technology — the CRM rollout being the obvious precedent. In technical industries the argument that lands is that the tool identifies where a customer's application creates a need, which makes the seller look brilliant in seconds.
- **Are people afraid AI will replace their jobs?** The room split, and along industry lines more than seniority. One general manager described his organization as bipolar — people fully engaged, and people anxious that their know-how is about to be automated. The reframe most participants had reached: it is not AI that replaces people, it is people who use AI well replacing people who are not using it properly.
- **What happens when AI governance lags adoption?** Individual judgment fills the gap. The open questions in the room were whether company information can go into a public model, whether the work should be walled off, and who decides — and in most of the organizations represented, policy was behind the adoption rather than ahead of it.
- **Does AI create competitive advantage on its own?** The room's view was that it levels the technical playing field rather than tilting it, because the same tools reach competitors on the same terms. Predictive analytics was the precedent cited: available in principle for two decades, adopted by few, and now arriving for everyone at once. That moves the differentiator to what people do with the output — how quickly they can take in information, judge it and act.

### [Igniting Intrinsic Motivation](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/roundtables/igniting-intrinsic-motivation)
August 27, 2025 · 89 min · Guest: Roy van Griensven, Head of Commercial Excellence, LANXESS

Roy van Griensven on the two questions he settles with a CEO before the work starts, the ninety-day projects people pick for themselves, and why ninety percent of the measurement effort goes into choosing the right leading indicator.

Practices from this session:
- Establish what the company wants before agreeing to lead it: a transformation, or a better outcome from the same operating model. The two need different work.
- Then settle what excellence means — best in class, copied from what worked elsewhere, or as good as the constraints allow. The ambition sets the approach.
- Spend five minutes of an hour on inspiration and the rest on why you are not there today and what is hampering you.
- Build people, process, data and systems together. A pricing tool or a CRM bought on its own moves little.
- Run learning as inspire, reflect, apply — and let the reflection reach the answer that it would not help here.
- Narrow the field to the capabilities critical over the next three to five years, then let each person choose the one that matters most to their own job for the next three to six months.
- Attach ninety days of coaching to that choice, so the work produces a change rather than a status update.
- Spend ninety percent of the measurement effort choosing the right leading indicators and ten percent connecting them to EBITDA — as a contribution, rather than a one-to-one return.
- Open the target conversation with what needs to be true to move the indicator, rather than with the number itself.
- Reward the person who shows you the gap. What happens to the first honest baseline decides whether the next one is honest.

Questions this session answers:
- **What is the difference between a transformation and an improvement, and why does it matter?** Transformation, taken literally, means doing something different from what you do today. Improvement means a better outcome from what you already do. Roy van Griensven’s experience is that in nine out of ten cases a company wants the second and calls it the first — and the two need different money, different sequencing, and a different tolerance for discomfort. Settling which one is intended is the first conversation to have with the CEO, not the last.
- **What should you ask before agreeing to run a commercial excellence program?** Two things. What do you really want and why do you want it — a transformation, or a better outcome from the same operating model. And then: what does excellence mean here? Best in class, copying what has worked for other companies, or as excellent as the constraints allow. Lifting an organization to best in class is a different ambition and a different approach from getting one maturity level better.
- **Why do experienced teams meet a new transformation with fatigue?** Because they have watched the sequence before. What Roy heard in his first thirty days at LANXESS was that this was the fourth attempt in fifteen years — a different sticker, a different consulting firm, the same shape of program. The question underneath it, what will be fundamentally different this time, is a fair one, and answering it is the first piece of work.
- **Why does a pricing tool or CRM rollout fail to change commercial performance?** Because a capability is four things — people, process, data and systems — and the system is the one you can buy with a delivery date attached. Rolled out into the same processes, the same data quality and the same competencies that produced the problem, it changes little on its own.
- **How is the LANXESS Commercial Excellence Academy structured?** Inspire, reflect, apply. A short piece of what good looks like elsewhere; a conversation about whether it matters in the person’s daily job, where the answer is allowed to be no; then each person picks one capability that matters most to their own job over the next three to six months, out of a field the center narrows to what is critical over the next three to five years. Ninety days of external coaching is attached to the choice, and the results are called Growth Projects. The academy has run seven cohorts and reached 300+ leaders, with fifty-two Growth Projects delivered up to the start of cohort seven and mid-eight-figure, CFO-validated EBITDA impact behind them.
- **How do you measure a commercial excellence program before EBITDA moves?** Split the effort ninety-ten. Ninety percent goes into deciding which leading indicators genuinely represent doing something better and different, pointed in the direction of the strategy. Ten percent goes into connecting them to the financial result — as a contribution rather than a one-to-one return, because the same result gets moved by customers, tariffs and markets that have little to do with the program.
- **What makes a good leading indicator?** It is tied to the direction of the strategy rather than to activity. If the strategy calls for growth in particular segments, the indicator is whether the pipeline is growing with customers the company has yet to win in those segments. The comparison Roy drew is to an IPO, where investors look past the quarterly number to whether the company is progressing into the potential of its strategy.
- **How do you set a target that people believe?** Set the lagging indicator aside for a moment and ask what needs to be true to move the leading one. Steep financial targets get met with wishful thinking; a question about what would have to be true, and what could be done tomorrow to move the number one percent, is something a team can engage with. From there the conversation can go from one percent to five to ten — and sometimes to doing the thing differently rather than incrementally.
- **What should a leader do when someone reports a bad baseline?** Thank them and ask what support they need. The alternative — landing on the problem and making an example of whoever owned the past performance — works once, and after it the honest number stops arriving. Roy repeats this to his own board at least monthly: leadership behavior at that level either accelerates a transformation or blocks it, and the block shows up as baselines that were negotiated before anyone read them.
- **Why is a green transformation dashboard a warning sign?** Because participation is easy to report. Looking at a mostly green board, Roy asked whether something was materially different or whether business unit leaders were satisfying the CEO — and that was happening. Agreement is free: people say yes in the meeting and go back to what they were doing the next day. What the leading indicators have to show is change, not sign-up.
- **What is guided discovery?** Walking a team through the chain of logic by asking the questions rather than presenting the conclusions. One version of it inverts the plan: if we were going to miss the target by a mile this year, what would we be doing to blow it? The answers come back concrete — we would stop visiting customers, we would leave this unfixed — and flipping each one over produces the plan out of the team’s own answers.

### [Harnessing Adversity to Win in Uncertain Times](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/roundtables/harnessing-adversity)
May 28, 2025 · 62 min · Guest: Dr. Paul Stoltz, creator of Adversity Quotient⁠® (AQ), Master Coach to the US Olympic Team

Dr. Paul Stoltz on forty years spent answering one question — who fails and who prevails — the five ways people meet adversity, and why almost everyone stops at coping.

Practices from this session:
- Assess before you train. A pre-assessment tells people where they stand and makes the improvement measurable against KPIs afterward.
- Start where the difference will show. Bring it into one function rather than announcing it enterprise-wide, then let the evidence spread it.
- Hire for AQ over credentials where you can. Given the choice, 98% of half a million people surveyed took the exceptional AQ over the perfect résumé.
- Work on your own first. A leader’s AQ ripples through the team, so the multiplier starts there.
- Ask what the first instinctive move is when adversity hits — avoid, survive, cope, manage, or harness. That is the number worth tracking.
- Stop training attitude. An authentically positive outlook tends to follow from how someone answers adversity rather than the other way round.
- Run AQ scores against the KPIs you already track, so the uplift shows up in the business rather than only in the assessment.

Questions this session answers:
- **What is Adversity Quotient (AQ)?** A measure of how a person responds to adversity — a hardwired pattern set in youth and stable for the rest of life, unless it is deliberately rewired. It has been measured in more than five million people across 137 countries, and the research behind it spans twenty-seven scientific disciplines, 3,500+ peer-reviewed studies, and 110 universities. The first version was validated with the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, which found it more valid and reliable than the college entrance exams it was tested against.
- **How is AQ different from IQ and EQ?** IQ is largely fixed. EQ is the capacity to read and use emotion, in yourself and others. AQ sits underneath EQ rather than beside it: what matters is not how well someone reads a room when things are calm, but whether they can still do it in the moment of truth — and reaching that moment takes a sufficiently high AQ. You need both, and AQ is what lets the other one operate under pressure.
- **Can AQ be improved, or is it fixed?** It can be permanently strengthened, and unusually, it is age-agnostic. Unlike language or music, there is no difference in the level of improvement between people in their sixties and people in their twenties. A full program typically moves a group 11–23%; assessment plus video coaching alone has produced 3–12%.
- **What does AQ predict?** Performance first — in this research the gap between high and low AQ runs to 166% of sales volume in telecom, 88% or more in life insurance, and 250–320% in real estate. Also productivity and capacity, innovation, goal size and completion rate, optimism and reported quality of life, physical health across several systems, and lifespan. Low-AQ people take triple the sick days and are ill twice as often.
- **What are the five levels of the adversity continuum?** Avoiding, surviving, coping, managing, and harnessing. Avoiding is the sick day and the unanswered email. Surviving is being still here at the end of it. Coping is keeping your head above water, and it is where most people live. Managing is what executive education teaches — taking a specific adversity and doing something with it. Harnessing is different in kind. The measure that matters is the first instinctive response, not what someone does eventually.
- **What does harnessing adversity mean?** Converting adversity into the fuel that propels you somewhere you would not have arrived at without it. Asked which companies had done that, one room named Apple, Netflix, Microsoft, Amazon, Spotify, and Tesla. Asked in an interview what the biggest blessing of his life had been, Steve Jobs answered adversity — without it, he said, his name would be unknown and Apple would not be Apple.
- **How do you introduce AQ into an organization already tired of change initiatives?** Start in one function where the difference will show quickly — sales, commercial excellence, marketing — rather than announcing it enterprise-wide. Pre-assess, run the equipping sessions, then reassess against KPIs the business already tracks, and let the evidence spread it. The argument for it being different from another initiative is that a higher AQ changes the lens through which people see each subsequent change, and immunizes them against the anxiety and pessimism that make change programs fail.
- **Is it worth hiring for AQ?** Given a choice between the candidate with perfect skills and a weak AQ and the one with an exceptional AQ missing some pieces, 98% of half a million people surveyed worldwide took the AQ. Asked how many ordinary employees they would trade for one person with that pattern, the global average is 7.2 — and among leaders, 8.4.

- [All roundtables](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/roundtables)

## Podcast

- [Accelerating Transformation with Roy van Griensven](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/podcast/accelerating-transformation-with-roy-van-griensven) — Mindset → Skillset → Toolset: the operating system behind a €7B transformation.
- [Eliminating Resistance with Roy van Griensven](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/podcast/eliminating-resistance-with-roy-van-griensven) — Why top-down transformations fall short, and the servant-leadership alternative that lasts.
- [Structured Autonomy with Paul Souren](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/podcast/structured-autonomy-with-paul-souren) — Sixteen years at Roche, and the "playground" model for owning the how.
- [Transformational Leadership with Dominique Signorel](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/podcast/transformational-leadership-with-dominique-signorel) — Why 70–90% of transformations fall short, and where ADKAR runs out.
- [Unlocking Growth with Mindset, Skillset, Toolset](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/masterclass/implementing-learning-programs-that-drive-growth) — Why corporate training produces negative ROI — and the architecture that replaces it.
- [Personal Backstory with Jesse Hopps](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/podcast/personal-backstory-with-jesse-hopps) — The psychology of transformation: why the hard part is your team's legacy, not the systems.
- [Harnessing Adversity with Dr. Paul Stoltz](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/masterclass/what-is-adversity-quotient) — Why IQ predicts almost nothing — and AQ⁠® predicts almost everything.
- [From Exec to Coach with Ron Denoo](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/podcast/from-exec-to-coach-with-ron-denoo) — Thirty years in global chemicals to a full consulting practice in five weeks.
- [All episodes](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/podcast)

## Infographics

- [The Four Futures](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/infographics/four-futures)
- [The “Inspire, Reflect, Apply” Bullseye](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/infographics/inspire-reflect-apply-bullseye)
- [The 2026 Transformation Playbook](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/infographics/2026-transformation-playbook)
- [The 3 Stages of Enterprise AI Adoption](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/infographics/three-stages-enterprise-ai-adoption)
- [People Don’t Resist Change. They Resist…](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/infographics/people-don-t-resist-change-they-resist)
- [Why KPIs Can’t Change Behavior](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/infographics/why-kpis-can-t-change-behavior)
- [The 3 Psychological Conditions for Zero-Resistance Change](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/infographics/3-psychological-conditions-for-zero-resistance-change)
- [The 4 Psychological Shifts That Eliminate Resistance](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/infographics/4-psychological-shifts-that-eliminate-resistance)
- [Stop Diagnosing Your People. Diagnose Your System.](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/infographics/stop-diagnosing-your-people-diagnose-your-system)
- [The Unintentional Message Your Change Program Is Sending](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/infographics/the-unintentional-message-your-change-program-is-sending-right-now)
- [Support First. Challenge Second.](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/infographics/support-first-challenge-second)
- [Touch the Heart, Not the Head](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/infographics/touch-the-heart-not-the-head)
- [The Vegetable Test](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/infographics/the-veggies-test)
- [The Transformation Sequence Most Companies Run Backwards](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/infographics/the-transformation-sequence-most-companies-run-backwards)
- [The Behavior Design Gap](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/infographics/the-behavior-design-gap)
- [The 6 Links Between Knowing and Results](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/infographics/6-links-between-knowing-and-results-and-where-yours-is-breaking)
- [Around Work vs. Through Work](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/infographics/around-work-vs-through-work)
- [5 Patterns That Kill Transformations](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/infographics/5-patterns-that-kill-transformations)
- [5 Signs You’re Running Transformation Theater](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/infographics/5-signs-you-re-running-transformation-theater)
- [The Passive Resistance Iceberg](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/infographics/the-passive-resistance-iceberg)
- [What Most Leaders Do vs. What Actually Works](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/infographics/what-most-leaders-do-vs-what-actually-works)
- [The 5 Levels of Change Mastery](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/infographics/5-levels-of-change-mastery)
- [7 Assumptions That Stopped Being True About Enterprise Transformation](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/infographics/7-assumptions-that-stopped-being-true-about-enterprise-transformation)
- [Why Transformation Is Harder Today](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/infographics/why-transformation-is-harder-today)
- [How Leaders Think They Grow vs. How They Actually Do](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/infographics/how-leaders-think-they-grow-vs-how-they-actually-do)
- [Chat-Based vs. Agentic AI](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/infographics/chat-based-vs-agentic-ai)
- [How AI Adoption Works (or Doesn’t)](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/infographics/how-ai-adoption-works-or-doesn-t)
- [Diagnose the Coalition, Not the Tech](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/infographics/diagnose-the-coalition-not-the-tech)
- [My AI Tech Stack](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/infographics/my-personal-ai-tech-stack)
- [What Is AQ⁠®, and Why Haven’t You Heard of It?](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/infographics/what-is-aq-and-why-haven-t-you-heard-of-it)
- [What Successful People Do Differently](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/infographics/what-successful-people-do-differently)
- [What’s the Commercial Excellence Consortium⁠™?](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/infographics/what-s-the-commercial-excellence-consortium)
- [250+ Consortium⁠™ Members](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/infographics/250-comex-consortium-members)
- [VP, Commercial Excellence — The Real Job Description](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/infographics/vp-commercial-excellence-job-description-april-fools-day)
- [The 7 Layers of Behavioral Change](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/infographics/7-layers-of-behavioral-change)
- [All infographics](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/infographics)

## Masterclass lessons

Free video sessions, each with a written summary, the key points, and the questions
the lesson answers. No sign-up.

Each lesson page carries the written lesson, the terms it defines, the questions it
answers, and the full transcript. Append `/llms.txt` to any lesson URL for that
lesson as plain markdown in a single request.

### Building a "Next-Gen" ComEx Academy
https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/masterclass/building-a-next-gen-comex-academy — markdown: https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/masterclass/building-a-next-gen-comex-academy/llms.txt
He stopped the consulting plan one month into the job, and rebuilt it on 20% of the budget.
Topics: commercial excellence academy, capability building, guided discovery, Growth Projects, intrinsic motivation, change fatigue, Adversity Quotient (AQ⁠®)
Defines: Guided discovery, Growth Project, Mindset → Skillset → Toolset, Change fatigue, Adversity Quotient (AQ⁠®), One-size-fits-all rollout, The knowing–doing gap
Answers 27 questions, including:
- What is a next-generation commercial excellence academy?
- Why did LANXESS stop a capability plan designed by a top-tier consulting firm?
- What did he propose to the CEO instead?
- How do you decide what each business unit works on?
- If every unit picks its own priority, do you still build all the capabilities?
- What was wrong with a hundred and forty training slides?
- What does guided discovery mean in practice?
- What is a Growth Project?

### What Is Adversity Quotient (AQ⁠®)?
https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/masterclass/what-is-adversity-quotient — markdown: https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/masterclass/what-is-adversity-quotient/llms.txt
Resilience is bouncing back. AQ is responding optimally — and unlike resilience, it can be measured.
Topics: Adversity Quotient (AQ⁠®), GRIT⁠™, resilience, response ability, emotional intelligence (EQ), measurement, adaptive capacity
Defines: Adversity Quotient (AQ⁠®), Response ability, Resilience (and why AQ goes past it), The AQ Profile, GRIT⁠™ (the four dimensions), Smart grit vs. dumb grit, Good grit vs. bad grit
Answers 30 questions, including:
- What is Adversity Quotient (AQ⁠®)?
- How is AQ different from resilience?
- What does Stoltz mean by response ability?
- Is AQ the same as grit?
- How is AQ different from emotional intelligence (EQ)?
- How is AQ measured?
- How many people have taken it?
- Can AQ actually be improved, or is it fixed?

### Implementing Learning Programs That Drive Growth
https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/masterclass/implementing-learning-programs-that-drive-growth — markdown: https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/masterclass/implementing-learning-programs-that-drive-growth/llms.txt
Do you know it? Can you do it? Will you do it? Most programs only ever answer the first one.
Topics: learning programs, project-based learning, guided discovery, the forgetting curve, self-determination theory, psychological safety, Mindset → Skillset → Toolset, Adversity Quotient (AQ⁠®)
Defines: The forgetting curve, Guided discovery, Project-based learning, Self-determination theory, Mindset → Skillset → Toolset, Control (the first dimension of AQ), Psychological safety, Do you know it / can you do it / will you do it
Answers 30 questions, including:
- Why do most corporate transformations fail?
- What percentage of transformation efforts actually succeed?
- What is wrong with the standard three-stages-of-change model?
- What should a company do instead of announcing a transformation?
- How much of what is taught is forgotten?
- Is the forgetting curve the real problem with corporate training?
- What retention rates do different learning methods produce?
- What actually makes learning stick?

### Igniting Intrinsic Motivation
https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/masterclass/igniting-intrinsic-motivation — markdown: https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/masterclass/igniting-intrinsic-motivation/llms.txt
Nine out of ten companies asking for transformation want an improvement. Say so before you start.
Topics: intrinsic motivation, leading indicators, capability building, guided discovery, Growth Projects, change fatigue, transparency
Defines: Transformation (as distinct from improvement), The four elements of a capability, Leading indicators, Contribution (rather than attribution), Growth Project, Guided discovery, Rewarding transparency
Answers 30 questions, including:
- What is the difference between transformation and improvement?
- What should you ask a CEO before taking a commercial excellence role?
- When should you walk away from a transformation mandate?
- What does change fatigue sound like in practice?
- What is the standard approach he wanted to dismantle?
- What is the easy way versus the hard way?
- What are the four elements of building a capability?
- Why doesn't buying a CRM or a pricing tool work?


## Programs and membership

- [Executive Fellowship](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/executive-fellowship) — 12-month engagement for leaders accountable for a transformation mandate
- [Executive Council](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/executive-fellowship/executive-council)
- [Operators Lab](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/operators-lab)
- [Masterclass](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/masterclass) — free video sessions on AQ⁠® and GRIT⁠™, each with a written lesson
- [Members](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/members)
- [About](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/about)

## Optional

- [Sitemap](https://commercialexcellenceconsortium.com/sitemap.xml)
- Research is conducted by Demand Metric ([demandmetric.com](https://demandmetric.com)) and published by the Consortium.