The Commercial Excellence Podcast

Roy van Griensven, Head of Commercial Excellence at a €7B specialty chemicals company, on why top-down transformations fail — and what actually works.

Consulting-led change relies on mandates and extrinsic motivation. It produces passive resistance. Roy's alternative is servant leadership: structured autonomy, psychological safety, bottom-up engagement.

People don't resist change — they resist being changed by others. Leaders who own transformation failures instead of blaming resistance get adaptive capacity as the outcome.

Paul Souren spent sixteen years at Roche. The lesson that stuck wasn't how to dominate as market leader — it was how to reinvent the company when a patent cliff erased the products that built it. Overnight, Roche entered neuroscience, hemophilia, and immunotherapy as the new kid on the block, not the eight-hundred-pound gorilla.

Paul unpacks the real difference between change and transformation — incremental improvement versus turning the caterpillar into the butterfly — and his "playground" model of structured autonomy: give people the guardrails and the why, then let them own the how.

He's direct on the hard parts — why empowerment is meaningless without accountability, why people fear the power they're handed, and how to move the person who says yes in the room and no in their head.

Dominique Signorel, Chief Product Officer at Honeywell, brings three decades of transformation leadership across Amphenol, ABB, and Honeywell — and a blunt question: why do 70 to 90 percent of business transformations fail?

His answer: not at the strategy level, but in implementation — where teams are asked to change how they work while still under pressure to hit short-term numbers. He shows where ADKAR's "desire" stage breaks down when people can't see what's in it for them, and where compliance passes for commitment.

Dominique makes the case for building transformation from the frontline up — starting with the pain points field teams actually feel — and for coaching over training, because lasting change needs practice and support, not one more knowledge transfer.

Expert panel on why traditional corporate training produces negative ROI — and the architecture that replaces it. Jesse Hopps with Ron Denoo, Kurt Friedmann, and Dr. Paul Stoltz.

The sequence matters. Mindset first — AQ® and GRIT™ as the foundation. Skillset second — real Growth Projects with on-the-job coaching. Toolset last — only when the work demands it.

Train without coaching and people forget 90% inside a week. Pair structured reflection with operator coaching on live commercial problems, and behavior changes. This is the learning science under the Operators Lab™.

Jesse Hopps on the psychology of enterprise transformation — why information and systems aren't the hard part. The psychological legacy of your team is.

He walks through the mechanics of passive resistance — the reason strategy decks and CRM rollouts quietly fail — and the case for structured autonomy: real agency inside clear boundaries.

Closes on the future of work under AI, and why winning organizations teach people to harness adversity instead of hide from it.

Dr. Paul Stoltz on why IQ predicts almost nothing, and why Adversity Quotient (AQ®) does. Master Coach for the USA Olympic Team; advisor to Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and P&G.

AQ® isn't resilience. Bouncing back produces fatigue; responding optimally the moment adversity strikes compounds. One AQ® tool unlocked $1.4B in a year at a global consumer company.

Also covers the hidden dependency: EQ needs enough AQ to function. Without it, emotional intelligence stalls when it matters most.

Ron Denoo retired from thirty years in global chemicals — CEO of a German plastics firm, twelve at Mitsubishi Chemical — on his own terms. Five weeks later, he had hit his annual consulting-income goal.

The playbook: announce the exit two years early, leave as an indispensable ally, open shop without a website. Consulting is a trust business. First client was his former employer.

Ron explains the shift from consultant (diagnose and deliver) to coach (guide teams to build capability) — and why "ask, don't tell" disarms resistance.