The Commercial Excellence Podcast

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.

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.