# 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. Topics: passive resistance, structured autonomy, psychological legacy, Demand Metric, Adversity Quotient (AQ⁠®), Growth Projects, guided discovery, the future of work under AI, commercial excellence ## Summary Jesse Hopps in the other chair, interviewed by Daniel Kube on Executive Conversations. It starts at nine years old selling flowers door to door in London, Ontario, and runs through the whole arc: quitting a job to move west, washing dishes at Earl's, ten thousand dollars of borrowed rent money, and twenty years building Demand Metric into a network of more than three hundred thousand members and over a thousand tools. Then the part that redirected it. Three years around the world with a chemicals client, running workshops that scored well and changed nothing on Monday, and a question he could not answer: how do you get the people who are not natural high performers to want to win? The answer arrived through a friend in San Luis Obispo and a body of science few people with an MBA have encountered. The back half is the design that came out of it, in more detail than it exists anywhere else: the four capabilities chosen out of fifty, the cohorts, the ninety-day Growth Projects, the operator-coaches, the deal made with each business unit leader, and the one percent of design freedom that makes the other ninety-nine land. ## Key points - Selling flowers door to door at nine, telling his mother at fifteen he would get into Ivey and be a millionaire by twenty-five, and living on his own from around the same age. - Five years to finish a three-year degree, a ninety-five average that was not enough, and a rejection from the business school he had aimed at since high school. - Quitting Info-Tech rather than staying, moving west with no plan, and washing dishes at Earl's. - The business he almost started instead, and the phone call that redirected it to marketing. - Ten thousand dollars of borrowed rent money, two hundred calls to reach ten people, and the first five hundred tools built on demand rather than on spec. - The break they did not engineer: the American Marketing Association finding the site, and a licensing business he had to have explained to him. - The Marketo call that started the vendor business, and the analyst-versus-media line they crossed without noticing. - The software venture that lost a few years and taught him group-based behavioral change, which turned out to be the thing worth having. - Three years around the world with a chemicals client, and the pattern: good workshops, real content, and nothing different on Monday. - The question he left that assignment with, about the middle of the bell curve rather than the top of it. - Transformation theater, named and defined, and the suspicion that a large share of transformation spend is waste. - The drive to San Luis Obispo, and the introduction that answered the question. - Climbers, campers and quitters, and why the campers are where the work is. - The McKinsey Health Institute numbers: 3.8x, 6x, twenty-three percent, and the sixteen percent of companies investing in any of it. - The academy design in full: fifty capabilities cut to four, the two-day format, the four corners, and the charters on the wall. - Ninety-day Growth Projects, operator-coaches who ran P&Ls, weekly calls where no answers are given, and a science fair at the end. - The deal Roy made with each business unit leader, which is the mechanism that made it spread. - One percent of design freedom, and why the other ninety-nine percent lands differently because of it. - Cutting the consulting budget by eighty percent, and a mid-eight-figure CFO-validated EBITDA result inside a year. - What AI changes and what it leaves exactly where it was. ## Definitions - **Psychological legacy** — The counterpart to technical debt, and Daniel Kube's phrase in this conversation. Alongside the systems a company has to keep running sits everything its people have learned about how change goes here: initiatives announced and abandoned, and ways of working that have long been done a certain way. It does not appear in the business case and it is the first thing an announcement lands on. - **Passive resistance** — People nod and agree in the meeting, then go back to what they were doing the next day. On the surface everyone agrees it is the right thing, they have bought in and they have the information, and their behavior does not line up with what they are telling you. Jesse's position is that transformation rests on whether you can minimize it. - **Engineering resistance in** — Jesse's reframing of who is responsible. A transformation designed elsewhere and aimed at people produces resistance by construction rather than by accident, so blaming the people for failing to execute mistakes an output for a cause. The corresponding job is to engineer passive resistance out. - **Structured autonomy** — Real agency inside clear boundaries. In his formulation it is roughly one percent of design freedom over the transformation, enough that people experience themselves as part of it rather than as the object of it. The direction and the guardrails stay central; what gets worked on inside them does not. - **Transformation theater** — The name Jesse gave the pattern after three years of running it: strategy decks, playbooks, workshops, travel, millions of dollars of spend, and no observable difference in what marketing and sales do on Monday morning. His suspicion is that a large share of transformation spend is waste that also distracts people from the real issue. - **Adversity Quotient (AQ⁠®)** — Dr. Paul Stoltz's measure of how a person responds to adversity, built over roughly four decades. Distinct from IQ and EQ, and predictive across a wide range of outcomes. The crucial property for transformation work is that, unlike IQ, it is not fixed: the pattern sets around age twelve and can be permanently improved once it is measured. - **Climbers, campers and quitters** — Stoltz's three groups. Climbers keep moving forward and up, with entrepreneurs at the top of the scale as a group. Quitters have effectively given up, take the paycheck and do the minimum. Campers are the large middle: they have arrived somewhere they do not want to lose, so they would rather nothing changed. Getting campers back on the climb is where transformation is won. - **The adaptability numbers** — From a McKinsey Health Institute study of thirty thousand people. Where people reported being resilient and adaptable, innovation and engagement ran about 3.8 times higher; adding psychological safety and organizational support took it to roughly six times. Only twenty-three percent reported being highly resilient and adaptable, and around sixteen percent of organizations were investing in building it. - **Mindset → Skillset → Toolset** — The sequence the academy runs on, and the inversion of standard practice. Most consulting and transformation work starts with tools. This starts with readiness to change and the ability to harness adversity, then builds skill on real work, and reaches tools last. - **Guided discovery** — The Socratic method applied to capability building. Rather than telling people what to do, you ask what their challenges are, have them frame their own problems and needs, and involve them in designing the solution. Jesse names it as the critical move, and points at the schools his own children attend as the same principle. - **Align, inspire, reflect, apply** — The academy's four phases. Align is asking business unit leaders which capabilities would matter most if they improved overnight. Inspire is showing the gap between status quo and best in class without a maturity assessment. Reflect is a safe room where people put their own challenges on the wall. Apply is a ninety-day project they chose. - **Growth Project** — A ninety-day piece of real commercial work, chosen by a self-formed team of three to five people drawn across business units, inside the capability areas the leadership named. Coached weekly by an operator, charter written on a large sheet on the wall, and presented to a panel at the end. Some scale into company-wide practice and some end, and both are acceptable outcomes. - **Operator-coach** — Deliberately not an analyst or career consultant. People who ran business units and led chemicals companies, coaching weekly by asking questions rather than supplying answers. Jesse is explicit that he excluded his own profile from the role, because the credibility that matters here comes from having done the job. - **The deal** — The reciprocity Roy set with each business unit leader, and the mechanism that let good work travel. You choose what you work on rather than receiving one program applied identically everywhere. In exchange, when someone else's unit develops something that works, you stay open to picking it up. Everyone accepted, which turned rollout into pull. - **Commercial excellence** — The title the field is consolidating on, largely a rebrand of digital transformation now that everything is digital. Usually a head of commercial excellence reporting to strategy across a portfolio of business units, funded by those units, working on pricing discipline, capability gaps, market strategy and getting units to work together on shared accounts. A few thousand people worldwide have the title. - **The information assumption** — That people behave differently once they know more. Twenty years of building exactly that is what led Jesse to the opposite conclusion. His own test of it: if information were the issue, everyone would be walking around in perfect health. We know better and we do not do it. ## Questions this answers ### What is this episode? Jesse Hopps interviewed by Daniel Kube on Executive Conversations, rather than hosting. The two have known each other for twelve to fifteen years, since Daniel used Demand Metric as a founder building startups. It is the fullest account of the backstory and of the academy design in one place. ### Where does the story start? Nine years old, knocking on doors selling flowers in London, Ontario. His parents had little money and little formal education, and he wanted to get somewhere else. He worked door to door, then in restaurants, and was living on his own from around fifteen. ### What did he tell his mother at fifteen? That he was going to get into Ivey and be a millionaire by twenty-five. Her response was to keep dreaming. He had set the goal and picked the school, which is the part that mattered for what followed. ### Did he get into Ivey? No. He was not pre-accepted out of high school despite roughly a ninety-five average, and he applied again after two years of university with mid-eighties grades and a strong recommendation, and did not get in. It took him five years to finish a three-year degree, in philosophy. ### What happened to his family during university? His parents went bankrupt, and he had a bank loan. That is what forced the job over the summer of first year, and the question of how he was going to pay for school from there. ### Where did the career begin? Inside sales at Info-Tech Research Group in London, a startup at the time in the IT analyst space, founded by Joel McLean, who had come out of Ivey and taught there. Jesse applied partly because he thought the connection might help him into the school. ### Why did he leave Info-Tech? He wanted to move to Vancouver and asked to work remotely. The answer was that it was not something they did and it would set a precedent. So he quit and moved anyway, with Joel offering to help him with whatever he needed. ### What was his first job out west? Washing dishes at Earl's. After that a software company, where he met his boss Alfie, and where he started working out what business he wanted to build. ### What business did he almost start instead? An events company called culture branding, built around corporate sponsorship. He had it ready to go and the first event planned. Looking at the numbers, he concluded it would be a fun business that would not get him where he wanted to go. ### Where did the Demand Metric idea come from? From applying the Info-Tech model to a different audience. In the early 2000s, with SiriusDecisions and Eloqua emerging, B2B marketing was becoming data-driven and revenue-focused rather than communications and pretty pictures. He saw a business in helping operationalize that shift. ### What did Joel say when he called? That he would be doing it himself in about ten years, after HR. So Jesse should get it started, and they would see where he was in a few years, and Joel would help with whatever he could. That is what cleared the way. ### How was it funded? By asking his boss Alfie for about ten thousand dollars, framed as two months of rent, enough to give the idea a go. He had data and a concept and thought he could build the product, test it, and see whether he could get subscription sales. ### What was the operating model in the early years? Sales first. Two hundred calls to reach ten people, working from lists of eight hundred numbers, calling the same companies repeatedly. Find a need, then build. The first five hundred tools were built on specific jobs the market asked for rather than on a content plan. ### How did the revenue work? A sale funded the asset, the asset produced a subscription, and the subscription produced renewals, with a little advisory work on the back of it. Building on demand rather than on spec is what let it grow without capital. ### What were the early conditions like? Him and four friends in a loft in Vancouver, sleeping on futons, with Jesse sometimes on the floor when he was hiring people to come and live and work with them. ### What was the first real break? The American Marketing Association finding the site and asking to license and white-label the material for their members. Jesse had not heard of licensing and took it because it sounded like good money and was all profit. The licensing relationships with the AMA and the ANA have run for well over fifteen years. ### How did the vendor business start? Around two and a half to three years in, with an email list of thirty to forty thousand marketers built from sampling the product on cold calls. Marketo called and asked whether they did newsletter syndication. Jesse asked what syndication was. The offer was five thousand dollars to send one white paper. ### What did that turn into? Syndicated sends became webinars, then research projects, then virtual summits with keynotes and research produced ahead of the event. A few hundred projects with Eloqua, Salesforce, Marketo and HubSpot. His partner John still runs that side, researching how technology affects revenue growth. ### Was there a downside to taking vendor money? Jesse names it himself as selling his soul to the devil, and is straight about why: an analyst business probably should not also be a media business. They were part media company and part analyst firm with no rules, because they were trying to stay alive. ### How big did Demand Metric get? More than three hundred thousand members who joined to use the material, not counting distribution through the associations, and millions of downloads. Well over a thousand tools and templates, which is what it became known for. ### What was the software venture? An attempt to build something like Monday.com without capital, closer to what ClickUp became. The insight was real: everyone was using Trello, and there was no way to combine Kanban boards into one view showing what was high priority across forty boards. They added their own methodologies as prebuilt project plans. ### What happened to it? It lost a few years and a lot of resources. They got about fifty companies adopting it, who tolerated buggy technology because the help with understanding their problem and designing a solution they owned was genuinely good. Project management software is a commodity, so they scrapped it and offboarded clients onto other platforms because they felt bad having convinced them in. ### So was it a waste? No, and this is the part that mattered. What they got out of it was a new skill: group-based behavioral change, and solutioning of spreadsheet messes. Difficult to learn and, as it turned out, the thing worth having. ### How did the Mitsubishi Chemical work come about? Their head of market strategy development found one of the templates in a Google search. The lead landed in the CRM, Jesse's partner Matt booked the meeting, and it turned into building a strategy development playbook to roll out globally across dozens of teams. ### What did that engagement involve? Three years and three trips around the world, with a lot of time in Charlotte, Düsseldorf and Tokyo, trying to get people using a new playbook. It started with advisory work customizing the playbook and an invitation to co-present at a workshop. ### Why is strategy hard in a chemicals business? Because there are a million applications. Plastic goes into everything, and the price per kilogram differs by application, with healthcare at far higher margin than automotive. Each application means different competitors and a complicated supply chain, so the strategy problem multiplies. ### What did he observe over those three years? That giving people the information and the tools, and even running interactive workshops where they built strategy alongside him, produced nothing different on Monday. It bothered him because the work was not making the impact it was meant to make. ### What question did he leave with? How do you get people who are not the naturally driven, high-performing profile to want to win? The entrepreneurs and the high-performing sales people were already doing it. His question was about everyone else, the middle of the bell curve, and he did not have an answer. ### What is transformation theater? His name for the pattern: strategy decks, playbooks, workshops, running around, millions of dollars of spend, and no visible effect on EBITDA. His suspicion is that a large share of what gets spent on transformation is waste that also distracts people from the real issue. ### How did he find AQ? Through Kurt Friedmann, who was running a consultant incubator Jesse had launched, helping around a hundred people move from corporate life into coaching and consulting. Kurt had been Demand Metric's most successful customer and had mentored more than seven hundred startup founders over fifteen years using Lean Startup customer development. ### What triggered the introduction? A new opportunity arriving while Jesse was driving his wife up for a weekend with the kids at their grandparents'. Roy, who had left Mitsubishi, was now head of commercial excellence at a German chemicals company with a four-year upskilling plan from a top-three strategy firm and wanted the usual content and workshops. Jesse's reaction was that he did not want to be complicit in the theater again. ### Who is Dr. Paul Stoltz? The originator of AQ, master coach to the US Olympic team, and faculty at MIT among others. He has spent roughly four decades studying how people respond to adversity, and how that response predicts outcomes across work, health, relationships and longevity. ### What did Stoltz say when Jesse laid out the situation? That he could assure him giving people the information on what they should do would not solve the problem. What Jesse needed to consider instead was the bell curve of adaptability inside any large organization. ### What are climbers, campers and quitters? The three groups on that curve. Climbers keep moving forward and up, with entrepreneurs at the top of the scale. Quitters have effectively given up, take the paycheck and do the minimum. Campers are the large middle: they have arrived somewhere and do not want to risk losing it, so they would rather nothing changed. ### Where is transformation won? With the campers. The climbers are already producing most of the results. Quitters drag and have to be dealt with, and focusing there does not make a transformation work. The question that matters is how you get campers back on the climb. ### Is AQ fixed, like IQ? No, and Jesse names this as the good news. The pattern of response is roughly hardwired from around age twelve, and once it is measured and shared with someone it can be permanently improved. The effects reach past work into relationships, family and health. ### Which groups score highest and lowest? Entrepreneurs are at the top of the scale as a group. Teachers, of all the groups measured, are at the lowest end, which Jesse notes with some alarm given who they spend their days in front of. ### Does having faced adversity raise your AQ? Not by itself, and Jesse is careful about this. It is not that a country or a person with a lot of hardship scores highly; it is whether they learned to respond well to it. Being handed difficulty and getting better at handling it are two different things. ### Why did he need external research to make the case? Because he was arguing against a recommendation from a top strategy firm, and his client's boss was a former partner at one of those firms who had bought the plan. Stoltz had studies, including Deloitte work on promotion speed, and Jesse needed something from a source that would land in that room. ### What did the McKinsey Health Institute study find? Across thirty thousand people, where individuals reported being adaptable and resilient, innovation and engagement ran about 3.8 times higher. Adding psychological safety and organizational support raised it to roughly six times. ### What is the number that makes it urgent? Only twenty-three percent of that sample reported being highly resilient and highly adaptable. So a company attempting wide change across tens of thousands of people is starting with nearly eight in ten telling you, up front, that they are not good at absorbing change. ### How many companies are doing anything about it? Around sixteen percent were investing in building adaptive capability. Which is the gap in one line: you need it, people say they do not have it, the whole transformation depends on it, and very few are funding it. ### What is the mindset, skillset, toolset argument? That most consulting and transformation work runs tools first, and the order should be reversed. Get people ready to change and able to harness adversity rather than be worn down by it, then develop skills on real work, and reach tools last. ### Why does classroom training rarely produce the change? Because transformation is not an information problem, a strategy problem or a clarity problem. Companies know what to do. The difficulty is getting people to do it consistently when things get hard, which is exactly when the behavior has to survive and usually does not. ### What is guided discovery? The Socratic method applied to capability building: rather than telling people what to do, ask what their challenges are, have them frame their own problems and needs, and involve them in designing the solution. Jesse calls it the critical move and points at the schools his own children attend as the same principle. ### What is the align phase of the academy? Going to the business unit leaders and regional heads and asking which capabilities, if they improved overnight, would move the business. The consulting recommendation had been to close all fifty in the capability matrix over four years. Jesse's counter was: pick four. ### Which four did they pick? Key account excellence, go-to-market strategy, value-based pricing, and opportunity and pipeline management. Those four floated to the top out of fifty, chosen by the leaders who fund the function rather than assigned to them. ### What is the inspire phase? Podcast-style videos with an expert drawing the gap between status quo and best in class, without a maturity assessment or a diagnostic. They recorded Ron from Mitsubishi, asking what most companies do on key account excellence and what the best he had seen looks like. The purpose is to plant seeds rather than to grade anyone. ### What happens before people arrive? They take the AQ and GRIT assessments, and get a guided discovery assignment: how would this show up in your work, and what would improving this capability change about your day and about hitting the goals? They arrive mentally prepared rather than cold. ### What happens on day one? Cohorts of thirty to forty people. The first half is Dr. Paul on AQ and GRIT, the science, and how it affects their own lives, then their scores are revealed. Then the framing: we are not consultants, we are not here to tell you what to do, you are the consultants. And the room fills with their challenges, what they have tried, the cost of not solving them, and what they need. ### What happens on day two? Focus. Four corners of the room for the four capability areas, and people go to the one they want to work on. Teams of three to five form spontaneously across business units, pick a topic, and spend about three hours writing a project charter, blown up onto a three-by-four sheet on the wall, with sticky notes. ### What was the hardest part for participants? Picking something. Their reaction was that there were so many things they could work on to get better. Which is itself the finding: the constraint was rarely knowing what was wrong. ### What is a Growth Project? A ninety-day piece of real commercial work the team chose, inside the named capability areas, coached weekly by an operator. It does not have to solve the problem. It might shine a light on it, build a business case, or do some research. At the end it is presented to a panel, and some scale into company practice while others end. ### Who does the coaching? Operator-coaches: people who ran business units and led chemicals companies, deliberately not analysts or career consultants. Jesse excludes his own profile from the role explicitly. The weekly call gives no answers, and teaches by asking questions. ### Wasn't this seen as extra work? That was the first objection, and the answer given was that this is the work. If one adversity is getting in the way of hitting the growth targets, and there is support and resource to go and fix it, that is not an addition to the job. ### What kinds of projects came out of it? Everything from an AI pilot to a team tackling the thirty days it took to get a SKU into SAP, which was costing them quotes. That team's own reaction was that it was out of their control, sitting with master data and IT. The reply was that they might still make progress on it. ### Did anyone senior see it happen? A board member was in the room and walked around during the presentations, and was struck by the level of engagement. What she was watching had involved zero training. It was people deciding which problems to work on. ### How did the playbooks come back into it? By request. One team working out how to decide between direct and indirect channel built a template and then asked whether Jesse had anything. He did, and had all along. The difference is that demand for the playbooks was generated rather than a template being pushed at anyone. ### Where did it start, and where did it go? North America first, on the theory that it might be more open to trying something new than German headquarters. The CEO backed it, in a company going through drastic cost cutting, and it moved to Germany. Stoltz had run the same science at Carnegie Mellon with German companies including Bosch and Mercedes and expected it to land well, because it is rigorous and heavily researched. ### What did participants say about it? One line Jesse repeats: the Academy is my happy place, this is where we can talk about the real issues we do not get a chance to talk about otherwise. Some of what surfaced was contentious, including friction created for one team by another department simply doing its job. ### What was the deal Roy made with the business unit leaders? No one-size-fits-all, no identical rollout everywhere at once. You choose what you work on. In exchange, when another unit develops something that works and it becomes the new way of working, you stay open to picking it up. Everyone agreed, because it is a fair trade. ### Why does that deal matter so much? Because it converts rollout into pull. The usual objection to letting units choose is that nothing can then be standardized. The reciprocity solves it: choice earns openness, so good practice travels on consent rather than on mandate. ### What is the one percent argument? Give people roughly one percent of design control over the transformation, and the other ninety-nine percent, the strategy firm's work, the systems, the corporate projects, lands far more easily. Because you respected the autonomy and the identity of the people you are asking to change, meetings about everything else happen in a different mindset. ### What were the results? The client cut the consulting budget by about eighty percent, changed the upskilling plan inside a month, and inside a year had a mid-eight-figure CFO-validated EBITDA impact. Jesse is careful that not all of it is attributable to the academy, and that some came from a pricing change. ### What does he think mattered more than the number? The visible momentum. A company that had felt beaten down, with a sense that it would not get through, became optimistic and proactive about solving its own problems. Back on the climb as a collective organization, at scale, is how he puts it. ### What is commercial excellence, as a function? Largely a rebrand of digital transformation now that everything is digital, and less IT-focused than PMO-focused. Usually a head of commercial excellence reporting to strategy across a portfolio, funded by the business units, working like an internal consulting group to drive profitable growth across regions and units. ### What does that function do day to day? Rolling out pricing discipline into businesses that may not know what it is or why they need it, closing capability gaps, running market strategy development, and getting business units to work together in markets. A few thousand people worldwide have the title. ### Why does the unified-account problem come up so often? Because many asset-heavy manufacturers are organized around product lines and regions rather than market segments. Jesse's example is a conglomerate with ten business units all approaching Tesla separately, and Tesla asking whether they could work out what they do and send one person. ### What does AI change? The capacity. Jesse runs the Consortium largely alone and does work that would previously have taken a team of six to ten, at very little cost. Critical thinking is not going anywhere, and using an LLM well without letting it agree with you is a skill in itself. ### What does AI leave exactly as it was? Whether people do anything differently. If people go into it treating AI as a threat, that becomes self-fulfilling. So the sequence is the same as ever: change their relationship with change and disruption first, then give them real projects in their own function with someone who has done it guiding the discovery. ### Who makes the best AI coach? Not the most technically inclined, in Jesse's experience. The best are people who frame questions that do not lead, because an LLM will build on whatever you have already said. Researchers with real clinical research training turn out to be among the strongest, because designing a study is the same discipline. ### What is the Commercial Excellence Consortium? A free, invite-only peer room for director and VP-level people running strategy, transformation or commercial excellence at multibillion-dollar B2B companies. No consultants, sponsors, vendors or sales people. Monthly roundtables, run as a nonprofit. ### Why run it as a nonprofit? Because the alternative reproduces the problem. Jesse contrasts it with peer communities that come with an upsell on the back end. His stated aim is for organizations to see there is a way to adapt and grow quickly, and to recognize how much resistance they are causing themselves by how they approach change. ### What is the argument in one sentence? Transformation rests on whether you can minimize passive resistance, and the way to do that is to stop aiming change at people and give them enough design freedom to be part of it. ## Quotations > "You're actually engineering resistance into your system. What you need to learn is how to engineer passive resistance out." > — Jesse Hopps > "Give people one percent design freedom on the transformation, so they feel like they're part of the transformation, not the object of change." > — Jesse Hopps > "There's technical debt, but there's also psychological legacy, where people have just always done things a certain way." > — Daniel Kube > "On the surface everyone's agreeing that it's the right thing to do, and they buy in and they have the information, but their behavior doesn't line up with what they're telling you." > — Jesse Hopps, on passive resistance > "If at the end of the day, on Monday morning, the marketing and the sales guys don't think and act differently, what's the point?" > — Jesse Hopps, on three years of workshops > "I didn't want to be complicit in this theater anymore." > — Jesse Hopps > "How do you get people who are not that profile, everybody else, to want to win?" > — Jesse Hopps, on the question he left the Mitsubishi assignment holding > "I can assure you that giving them the information on what they should do isn't going to solve the problem." > — Dr. Paul Stoltz, as Jesse recounts their first meeting > "Do you really want them to score that they had the knowledge on the test, or do you really want the organization to start winning again?" > — Jesse Hopps, to his client > "I measure on EBITDA, not attendance." > — Roy van Griensven, as Jesse recounts it > "We're not consultants. We're not here to tell you what to do. You're the consultants." > — Jesse Hopps, opening the first cohort > "The Academy is my happy place. This is where we can actually talk about the real issues we don't get a chance to talk about otherwise." > — A participant in the German cohort, as Jesse reports it > "We generated the demand for the playbooks, because they asked for help. Not us shoving a template on them." > — Jesse Hopps > "It's not the short-term EBITDA. It's the visible momentum. They're back on the climb as a collective organization, at scale." > — Jesse Hopps > "Before people find their purpose, they need to be better at dealing with change in the first place." > — Jesse Hopps, on the future of work > "If information were the issue, we'd all be walking around like fitness models in perfect health. We know better, we just don't do it." > — Jesse Hopps ## Transcript ### Selling flowers at nine Daniel Kube: I would love to hear about your story. You started off in the London area and built a really cool company. How did you get started? Jesse Hopps: My story starts way back when I was maybe nine years old, knocking on doors selling flowers door to door. I came from a rough neighborhood in London, Canada, not London England. My parents did not have a lot of money or a lot of education, but I had always wanted to rise up in life and get to a new station. So I worked really hard as a kid. I worked door to door, worked in restaurants a lot, and then I was going to Western University, and my goal was to get into the Ivey School of Business, one of the top business schools in Canada. When I was fifteen I told my mom: I am going to Ivey, and by the time I am twenty-five I am going to be a millionaire. And she said, okay, keep dreaming. ### The school he did not get into Jesse Hopps: I did not get pre-accepted in high school, which was one path in, and it was really competitive. I think I had about a ninety-five average and it still was not enough. So I went into first year and studied philosophy. While I was at university my parents went bankrupt, and I had a loan from the bank. So over the summer of my first year I had to get a job and figure out how I was going to pay for school. I had been living on my own from the time I was about fifteen. There was a company in London, a startup called Info-Tech Research Group, that is now probably half a billion dollars in annual revenue and competes with Gartner head on. They were just getting going in the IT analyst space, and they had come out of Ivey. The founder, Joel McLean, taught at Ivey. I thought, maybe this is my path. So I applied and got a job in inside sales. It took me five years to get through a three-year degree, and I did not end up getting into Ivey. I applied after two years, my grades were mid-eighties, not enough even with a great recommendation from Joel. ### Quitting, and washing dishes Jesse Hopps: After five years I was about to graduate, and I asked Joel: I want to move out west to Vancouver. He asked why. I said the weather here is not great, and young men go west. My dad did, my uncle did. So I asked what if I work from home and do it from out there. You can trust me, you helped me through university, I worked full-time and went to school part-time all this time and kept my numbers up. He said, we do not really do that, it sets a precedent. So I said okay, I am going to quit then, and I am going to move out west anyway. And I did. He said he would help me with whatever I needed. I got out there and got a job at Earl's washing dishes. That was my first job. Then I got a job at a software company, and I met this guy Alfie, a great guy, a British guy. ### The business he almost started Jesse Hopps: I knew I wanted to start my own company. That was why I left Info-Tech. I was going to do an events company, this thing called culture branding, a whole sponsorship play getting big companies who want to sponsor events. I had it all ready to go and the first event planned. Then I looked at the numbers. It would be a fun business, but it was not really going to get me where I wanted to go. So I thought, why do I not take what I learned at Info-Tech and apply that business model to a different job type? This is early two-thousands, when SiriusDecisions was first coming out and Eloqua and the marketing automation thought leadership was appearing. B2B marketing was going through a revolution where it was not just communications and pretty pictures, it was data-driven and metrics-oriented and revenue-focused. Maybe there is a business in helping to operationalize that transformation of marketing as a function. So I called Joel and said: what do you think about doing an Info-Tech idea but for marketing? He said, well, I will be doing it in ten years. I am going to do HR after this, and then I will get into marketing. So why do you not get it started, we will see where you are at in a few years, and I will help you with whatever I can. ### Ten thousand dollars Jesse Hopps: So I talked to my boss Alfie. I said I do not really have money to start this business, but I really think it can work. I have a lot of experience in it, but I need some startup capital. I need a couple of months of rent so that I can just try. He asked how much. I said two months rent, ten grand would be enough to give the idea a go. This was before lean startup was even really a thing. I said I have some data, I have a concept, I can build the product and test it and see if I can get some subscription sales. ### Two hundred calls to reach ten people Daniel Kube: How did you manage to get all those assets created? Jesse Hopps: The business model was sales first. Make the calls. Back then you could get hold of people. You do two hundred calls, you talk to ten people. I did not even know who was in charge. There was no data, really. I just had eight hundred numbers for companies, and called them about five hundred times in a row. So if you think about lean startup, it was: go sell, find a need, build something. And I repeated that for years. We built our first five hundred tools on the back of specific needs the market asked for. Jobs to be done, really. That is how we built the assets. It was all based on getting a sale to develop an asset, then a subscription, then renewals, and we did a little advisory on the back of that. It was me and four buddies in a loft in Vancouver, sleeping on futons, and I think I slept on the floor sometimes when I was hiring people to come and live and work with us. ### Licensing, and a word he had to look up Jesse Hopps: We got a break when the American Marketing Association found our site. They said we love your stuff, we would like to license this and white-label it and send it to our members. We thought that would be a great brand play for us. So we got into licensing of content. I did not know what licensing was. I had never heard of that before. It sounded like good money, and it was all profit, so we started doing it. We have been licensing with the ANA and the AMA now for well over fifteen years, which has been a great thing for distribution and for building up the brand. ### The Marketo call Jesse Hopps: Around two and a half, maybe three years in, we had a pretty good email list going, maybe thirty or forty thousand marketers by that point from sampling the product on the cold calls. I think Marketo was the first one who called us, a director of demand generation or something. They asked: do you do any syndication of your newsletter? I said, what is syndication? She said, I will give you five thousand dollars if you send an email with my white paper to your list, and it is a really good white paper. I said, how many do you want to send? So we did our first deal with the vendors. I would say selling my soul to the devil. We did not really know that if you are in the analyst business you probably should not be doing both. We were kind of a media company and kind of an analyst company, and we did not really have any rules. We were just trying to stay alive. So syndicated sends turned into webinars, turned into research projects, turned into virtual summits where we had to have a keynote and a gold speaker, and we would do the research leading up to the event. Probably a few hundred projects with Eloqua, Salesforce, Marketo, HubSpot. My partner John still runs that whole side, doing research on how tech is impacting revenue growth. We ended up building well over a thousand of these tools. That is really what we got known for. And we are over three hundred thousand members who have joined Demand Metric to use our material, not counting all the distribution through the associations. Millions of downloads. ### The software fiasco Jesse Hopps: We had launched a little software company, trying to do something like Monday.com but without any capital. It was a flaming disaster of resources lost. We were trying to build what ClickUp ended up being, before ClickUp came out. Everyone was using Trello, but you could not really combine Kanban boards into one simplified view if you just wanted to see across forty boards what was high priority this week. So we thought, let us build that, and add all of our methodologies so you have all these prebuilt project plans. We thought it was a brilliant idea. We sunk a few years into it. We got about fifty companies adopting the solution. They put up with technology that was pretty buggy, because we did such a good job helping them understand their problem, their workflow, and how to design a solution the team felt they built and owned. So we got really good at group-based behavioral change. That was a new skill we learned, and it was really difficult. But our technology was pretty poor, and project management technology is a commodity. So we scrapped the software business. We had to offboard all the clients we had brought in onto new platforms, because we felt bad that we had convinced them to get into the tool. ### Three years around the world Jesse Hopps: While that was happening, somebody needed to make payroll. My partners John and Matt were dealing with the software clients, and I got an opportunity to do some deep consulting and coaching work with Mitsubishi Chemical Group. Their head of market strategy development had done a Google search and found one of our templates online. We were like, this whale lead just came into the CRM, get hold of this guy. My partner Matt booked him. He wanted to build a strategy development playbook to roll out globally across dozens of teams. So we did a little advisory work customizing a playbook, and then he invited me to co-present at a workshop. That was the beginning of a three-year run with them, around the world three times, a lot of time in Charlotte and Düsseldorf and Tokyo, basically trying to get people using this new playbook. In the chemicals business it is really complicated, because there are a million applications. Plastic goes into everything. There are different prices people pay per kilogram depending on the application, so healthcare applications are much higher margin than automotive. Every application means competing with different suppliers, with a complicated supply chain. ### Nothing different on Monday Jesse Hopps: So I learned about complex strategy in practice, and I learned that giving people the information and the tools, even doing interactive workshops where they built some content or some strategy with us, they would go back to work on Monday and nothing would have really changed. We had licensed content to them for years. I was really bothered that I did not feel it was making the impact it was intended to make. We did not really have the answer at that point. We had the question. And the question was: how do you get people who are not super highly motivated, type A, the people who win all the time, who carry companies, the entrepreneurs, the high-performing sales people, how do you get everybody else to want to win? To want to perform, to grow, to get better at their job, when they are not intrinsically motivated to do that? I was baffled. That is what I now call transformation theater. You have the strategy decks, the playbooks, the workshops, running around, spending millions and millions. But is it really affecting the bottom line and EBITDA at the end of the day? My suspicion was that a big chunk of what is being spent on transformation is waste, and it is distracting people, and they are not solving the right issue. You can get paid a lot to do consulting, playbook design, roll out tools and templates. But if on Monday morning the marketing and sales people do not think and act differently, what is the point? ### Technical debt and psychological legacy Daniel Kube: A transformation is really weaving a huge blanket together, and revenue is a really important thread. But to your point, unless you can affect change to motivate people to do things, it is really hard to get systems adoption across the board. And there is technical debt, but there is also psychological legacy, where people have just always done things a certain way. I think that frustration is what built you up to go to this new thing. Jesse Hopps: Transformation to me rests on one thing. Whether or not you can minimize what I call passive resistance to change. It is not people outright saying no, and maybe they say it behind your back when you leave the room. They tell their colleague: this is not going to work here, we tried this before, you are the fifth person who has tried this. We tried CRM, it does not work for us. That is a mindset. So you get this passive resistance where people say, okay, I will log in, I will put in the minimum data fields that are required, and I will put in poor data. You have adoption on the surface and the reports are not usable. Anyone who works in systems and software and transformation knows this. On the surface everyone is agreeing that this is the right thing to do, and they buy in and they have the information, but their behavior does not line up with what they are telling you. ### What commercial excellence is Daniel Kube: Is commercial excellence a new thing? Are there commercial excellence titles now? Jesse Hopps: It is a new title, out of B2B. A lot of pharma companies and industrials are changing what used to be called digital transformation, because everything is digital and the name does not really make sense any more, to commercial excellence. It is less an IT-focused thing and more of a PMO thing: we are doing this because we want to drive growth and revenue, so we need to modernize how we understand the market, sell and market. A few thousand people in the world have the title. Typically a head of commercial excellence reports to the head of strategy across a portfolio of businesses. Think of a large enterprise with ten business units and fifty product lines. The commercial excellence job is a kind of internal consulting organization, driving profitable growth across all the regions and business units. And the business units are typically the ones funding the shared service. If you are trying to roll out pricing discipline and systems into businesses that do not know what it is, why they need it, or how it should work, that is one thing they would do. They might also do upskilling, closing capability gaps, market strategy development, or getting different business units working together in markets. A lot of organizations are structured around product lines and regions, not market segments, especially asset-heavy manufacturers. So you might have ten different businesses all targeting Tesla with their product line. And Tesla says: can you figure out what you do and how you could help us, and send one person in here instead of ten who do not talk to each other? That is the customer experience out there. ### The drive to San Luis Obispo Jesse Hopps: After the software fiasco I was doing enterprise consulting and coaching, and I had launched a consultant incubator, helping people out of corporate life transition into coaching and consulting. People are living longer and it is hard to get a job after fifty-five or sixty. We had about a hundred people in it. The person I pulled in to coach the program was probably our most successful Demand Metric customer, who used the tools to build sales playbooks and monetize them. He has had a few exits and works because he wants to. He has mentored startup founders for about fifteen years, over seven hundred of them, using customer development from Lean Startup. His name is Kurt Friedmann, in San Luis Obispo. I was driving my wife up for a weekend, kids with the grandparents, and on the way I got a new opportunity. Another big chemicals company. The person who had left Mitsubishi had gone to a new place and was now head of commercial excellence. He had a plan from one of the top three strategy firms to upskill the organization in sales and marketing over four years, and he wanted us to develop content and do workshops and playbooks and the usual. But I had this feeling that if we do this one, people are going to say yes, yes, I get it, I have the playbook, I understand, and then not act differently. And I did not want to be complicit in this theater any more. So I asked Kurt: how do you get people to want to grow and develop? And he said, it is funny you mention that. I have a friend in my hometown. His name is Paul Stoltz. ### What Stoltz said Jesse Hopps: Paul is the master coach of the US Olympic team. He has been faculty at MIT. He has developed this science over the last forty years, studying how human beings respond to adversity, and how our interpretation of it predicts pretty much everything. It predicts how well we deal with change, who wins in sales across all industries, whether you beat diseases, whether you live longer, whether you stay married. Your ability to deal with setbacks, challenges and difficulties is the thing. It is not about IQ, it is not about EQ, it is about AQ. So I flew to San Luis Obispo and told him the situation: a German chemicals company, Chinese product flooding the market, getting beaten up across industries, trying to work out how to transform and sell on value. And I have been commissioned to deliver training on business best practices, but my feeling is that is not going to get them over the hump. He said: I can assure you that giving them the information on what they should do is not going to solve the problem. What you need to consider is that there is a bell curve in every large organization. ### Climbers, campers and quitters Jesse Hopps: At the front end of the curve you have people who are highly adaptable, highly resilient, thriving on adversity. Entrepreneurs as a group are at the top of the AQ scale. Paul calls them climbers. They are always on the climb, forward and up. At the bottom end you have people who have learned to be helpless, who are victims: it is out of my control, so why even try. Those are the quitters. They have quietly quit. They still take the paycheck, and they do the minimum. And then there is a big group in the middle. Your B and C players. Paul calls them campers. Campers have arrived at a certain point in their career, and they want to keep things the way they are. They do not want to risk it to get better. They do not want to lose what they have already accomplished. That is the majority of the world. So when a new transformation comes in, a new leader arrives, the campers think: all this stuff is coming at us, let us minimize the impact. That is the passive resistant group. The climbers say: let us do it, it is new, let us make it work. The good news is it is not like IQ, where it is fixed. You can permanently improve people's response to adversity once you measure it and share with them how they are wired. It is a hardwired pattern from about the age of twelve, and they can change how they view challenge and difficulty. And when they do, it is not only the business impact. You can change these people's lives, in their relationships with their children, their family, their health. So the real challenge is how do you get the campers back on the climb. The climbers are already getting it done. Quitters drag everybody down and you do need to deal with them, but you are not going to make transformation work by focusing on the quitters. ### Finding the business case Jesse Hopps: I went back to my client and said, I met this guy, he works with Olympians and top companies, and all the top business schools use this in their problem-solving courses. It is predictive. How do we incorporate it into this upskilling thing? Do you really want them to score that they had the knowledge on the test, or do you really want the organization to succeed and start winning again? He said: I want real impact. I measure on EBITDA, not attendance. But I was reacting to a strategy recommendation from one of the top firms. My client's boss was a former strategy consulting partner at one of those firms, who had bought the plan. So I needed something at that level that was going to be convincing. Paul had studies, including Deloitte work on people getting promoted faster, but it was not coming from a top consulting organization. So I searched for how adaptability and resilience factor into engagement and business results, and this study came up. The McKinsey Health Institute report on adaptive leadership. Thirty thousand people. What they found was that when people self-reported that they were good with change, that they can form new habits easily, that they can bounce back from a setback, they were about 3.8 times more innovative and engaged at work. And the other two factors that took it from 3.8 to six times were psychological safety and organizational support. But the shame of it is that only twenty-three percent of that sample felt they were highly resilient and highly adaptable. So you are trying to get wide-sweeping change across tens of thousands of people when almost eight out of ten will tell you right out of the gate: I am just not that good at taking in new changes. And I think it was about sixteen percent of organizations that are investing to make their people more adaptable. So you need it, people do not feel they have the adaptive capacity, you are relying on it to get major change through, and only sixteen percent of companies are investing in building it. ### Why information is not the problem Jesse Hopps: The soft stuff has really become the hard thing: getting people to want change, to be open to it, to be excited about new possibilities. So we said, no matter what we do here, we need to not just give people information. Transformation is not an information problem. It is not a strategy problem, it is not a clarity issue. Companies know what to do. It is getting people to do it consistently when things get tough and customers are demanding, when you are trying to hold pricing discipline and the customer is grinding you at the end of the quarter. It is in those moments that if the behavioral change does not take, the transformation does not happen. We pitched it as a mindset, skillset, toolset framework, whereas most consulting and transformation work is tools first. Get them ready to change, get them to harness adversity instead of getting bogged down and beaten down by it, then develop skills. I do not believe traditional classroom training, providing information and doing simulations, really works. Look at the people who went into Crotonville at GE. That was an amazing place where they gave you real-world projects. The issue is that you cannot manage change. People resist when they are asked by someone else to change. They have to want to change for themselves. If information were the issue, we would all be walking around like fitness models in perfect health. We know better, we just do not do it. So we put in the big thing called guided discovery, using the Socratic method. My kids went to Montessori and now go to a school on the Fontán system, which is independent learning: here are the questions, you have a teacher and a coach you can ask, and you decide when you are ready for your exams. Do not tell people what to do. Ask them what their challenges are, have them frame their own problems and needs, and get them involved in designing the solutions. That is the critical unlock. ### Align: fifty capabilities down to four Daniel Kube: If you are talking about one-off projects where sales people give input, how do you make that repeatable? Because if there are snowflakes, it is really hard to replicate snowflakes. Jesse Hopps: What we designed with Roy at this roughly seven-billion-dollar chemicals company was a next-generation commercial excellence academy structure. It is engineering an environment for adaptation to occur naturally, rather than the typical top-down mandated change. And it is not that Roy does not have dozens of corporate projects going, major pricing initiatives, all kinds of things. What we added was a layer. We have an align, inspire, reflect, apply framework. Align is going to the business unit leaders and the regional heads and asking: what are the capabilities that, if you could wave a wand and get better at them overnight, would actually make an impact on the business from your point of view? There were fifty capabilities in the matrix. The big consulting firm said you have to close all fifty over four years, with rounds and rounds of training. We said that is too many. Pick four. You are the ones paying for our function. What do you want to get better at? They came down to key account excellence, go-to-market strategy, value-based pricing, and opportunity and pipeline management. Of the fifty, those four floated to the top. ### Inspire, and preparing people before they arrive Jesse Hopps: To get the field bought in and encouraged to work on these things, we had them watch some podcast-style videos. We recorded an expert. We actually got the person from Mitsubishi to do a podcast, and we asked: what is status quo, what do most companies do when it comes to key account excellence, and what is the best you have seen? He drew the gap between normal and best in class without a maturity assessment or a diagnostic or any of that. Let us plant some seeds: we are doing this, but maybe we could do that. Then we sent out the AQ and GRIT assessments ahead of meeting people, so they would measure their AQ. And we gave them a guided discovery assignment: how would this show up in your work? How would improving in this capability area manifest in making life easier and helping us hit our north star goals? We prepped them mentally before we met them. ### Day one: you are the consultants Jesse Hopps: We brought cohorts of thirty or forty people together. We started in North America, figuring it might be a bit more open-minded to trying new things than German headquarters. We called it the Commercial Excellence Academy and brought in Dr. Paul as a keynote speaker. Day one was learning about AQ and GRIT, the science, and how it can affect people's personal lives. Then we revealed their scores. People were excited. They were thinking: maybe we can take these challenges and adversities and use them as fuel to get somewhere we would never otherwise have got to. Then we told them: we are not consultants. We are not here to tell you what to do. You are the consultants. Put your consulting hat on and tell us your top challenges. Why is doing key account excellence the textbook way not easy for you? What is the difficulty with standing up on price? And they said: you have overcapacity being dumped in our markets, how do we win against that, people do not want to pay for sustainability. So we get all the reasons why it cannot work on the table, all the challenges and issues. We ask what they have tried so far. We ask what they need to solve it. And they littered the conference room with challenges, hurdles, actions they had tried, the impact of not solving these things, and what they felt they needed. ### Day two: four corners and a charter on the wall Jesse Hopps: Day two was about focus. We said: for the next ninety days we are going to pair you with a coach. Not someone like me, an analyst consultant type, a career consultant. An operator coach, someone who ran business units and was a CEO of chemicals companies. And you are going to design what we call a Growth Project. This is structured autonomy. Within the bounds of those four capability areas and your own problems and needs, pick something you are intrinsically motivated to work on. We set up four stations, four corners, with about thirty-five or forty people. Go into the corner you want to work on. Is it key account? Go-to-market? Pricing? Pipeline? And they spread out. We had mixed the business units together. Then: form teams of three to five, spontaneously, pick a topic, anything you want, as long as it improves your capability in one of these areas. We gave them project charters, the basic one-pager, blown up onto a three-by-four sheet. We put them on the walls and gave them sticky notes. Your job for the next three hours is to form a team, write a problem statement, and describe the current state and the future state you want to get to. It is a completely safe environment. We know nobody is perfect on any of this, and we know there are all kinds of internal issues. The hardest part for them was picking something. They said: there are so many things we could do to get better around here. You do not have to solve the problem in ninety days. You might shine a light on it, build a business case, do some research. Some teams wanted to run a pilot with AI. Others said: it takes us thirty days to get a SKU up into SAP and we are getting killed because we cannot quote fast enough. And then: but that is way out of our control, that is master data and IT. And we said, you might be able to make some progress on it. ### The science fair, and the coaching Jesse Hopps: In the afternoon we all walked around in a group and they presented their projects, like a science fair. This is the problem, this is what we intend to do. It is a part-time project in addition to everything else they have to do. The initial objection was that people might see this as extra work they do not have time for. And we said: no, this is the work. If there is one adversity getting in the way of hitting our growth targets, and you have support and resource to go and fix that problem, then we are going to treat strategy the way Richard Rumelt does and solve issues rather than set goals and ambitions. We had a board member in the room, and she walked around and was blown away at the level of engagement. There was zero training. It was them deciding what problems to work on. Then the coaching starts. Ninety days, a weekly call, how is it going. No answers being given. Teaching people how to fish by asking questions. At the end of the ninety days they present to a board panel, and they would get additional resource if they wanted to scale up. Some things just ended. Others became new best practices. One was: how do we decide between indirect and direct on the channel? They made a little template for it. And they said, Jesse, do you have any templates? I said, do not worry about it, I have all kinds of templates back here. But we generated the demand for the playbooks, because they asked for help. Not us shoving a template on them. ### Germany, and the happy place Jesse Hopps: In the end the CEO got behind this, in a company going through drastic cost cutting. They decided to bring it to Germany, to try it at headquarters. Paul has been doing this at Carnegie Mellon with a lot of German companies for a very long time, with Bosch and Mercedes and others, and he was confident German leadership would like it, because it is so scientifically based and rigorous and there is so much research behind it. So we get to Germany and do another round of the academy. People are saying things like: the Academy is my happy place. This is where we can actually talk about the real issues that we do not get a chance to talk about otherwise. And some of the issues were contentious. They said: we have friction because another department doing its job is inadvertently creating this problem for us with our customers. ### The deal, and the one percent Jesse Hopps: And what happened to all the other top-down mandates and projects? The acceptance and the social contract changed. When Roy started the program with every leader, he said: I am not going to give you one size fits all. We are not going to implement everything the same way across all regions at the same time, which is what most people do because they think it is more efficient. You are going to pick what you want to work on. We will work on these things together, and I have a whole host of things commercial excellence can help you with, but you get to choose. But here is the deal. If you work on something and develop the best practice in your region or your unit, and we take that and spread it through the rest of the company as the new way of working, will you, on the flip side of getting to work on what you are passionate about, be open-minded about picking up something somebody else in the company worked on? And he made that deal with everyone. They all said, yes, of course. If I can work on the thing I think is most important to us growing, then I will be open to trying new things from other people. It is a fair deal. And so it was pulling. Even at the corporate level, when we added this tiny layer, imagine giving them one percent control over the design of the transformation. The other ninety-nine percent that has been playing out with the big firms lands so much easier, because you respected the autonomy and the identity of the people you are trying to get to change with a small portion of it. Once you let them design something they feel is real, all the other projects, all the other meetings, meeting with the consultants, meeting with new vendors, happen in a completely different mindset. ### What it produced Daniel Kube: So this is transformational from an economic impact perspective? Jesse Hopps: Let me put it this way. Not all of this is attributable to the academy. But in general, the client took the job, and within a month changed the entire plan on how to do upskilling, which is a really risky move. He said: I am going to cut the consulting budget by eighty percent, but you have to give me some leeway on how I approach transformation. In less than a year he had a mid-eight-figure impact on CFO-validated EBITDA. In fairness, some of that was a pricing change. But once you pull the pricing lever you have to find other ways to organically grow EBITDA. And the big thing was not so much the short-term EBITDA. It is the visible momentum. The feeling in the company went from being beaten down, there is no way we are going to get through this, to optimism. The culture changed to: no, we can do this, we can get proactive, we can solve these issues. They are back on the climb as a collective organization, at scale. So rapidly changing the mindset and behavior of people is doable. It is just not the way that ninety percent of the people I talk to in the Consortium are doing it. They are still stuck in hire the big firm, get the trainers in, get the content out there, and then have the passive resistance and selective adoption, and blame the people for being resistant and unable to execute. And I am saying no. You are actually engineering resistance into your system. What you need to learn is how to engineer passive resistance out. The way to do that is structured autonomy, these Growth Projects, and giving people one percent design freedom on the transformation, so they feel like they are part of the transformation team, not the object of change that everything is aimed at. ### The Consortium Daniel Kube: The gig you are running now, sharing these practices in a community. What does that look like and how can people get involved? Jesse Hopps: It is called the Commercial Excellence Consortium. When I found this new title, I thought maybe there are more people like him we can help, and share his story. So monthly roundtables, no consultants, no sponsors, no vendors, no sales people. Only peers: director and VP level running strategy, transformation or commercial excellence at multibillion-dollar B2B companies. It is invite only, and it is free. We did one on enterprise adaptability. We brought in Dr. Paul to speak at some of these. Roy spoke about intrinsic motivation and broke down his program as a case study. We are creating a peer exchange network, and it is not one of these typical things where there is an upsell on the back end and everyone is going to be pitching you at the conference. It is truly peer to peer, and I am running it as a nonprofit. I just want the world to see there is a way to rapidly transform and grow and adapt. If I can get a few more organizations on the climb, and get them to realize how much resistance they are causing by the way they approach change, it will have been worthwhile. ### What AI changes Daniel Kube: If you take your model, and that one percent, and add gasoline to the fire where that one percent can now drive real impact with capacity people never had before, that magnification is insane. Jesse Hopps: I am seeing it myself. I am running this Consortium virtually by myself, doing the job of what would have taken a team of six to ten before, with very small amounts of money and time. That said, critical thinking is not going anywhere. Using the LLMs effectively, and not having it be a yes-man that tells you what you want to hear, is a skill in itself. But before we help people learn to use AI effectively, we need to get them thinking about the opportunity it provides. If people go into it treating it as a big threat that is going to be terrible, they will have a self-fulfilling prophecy. So fundamentally we need to change their relationship with change and disruption, and get proactive about how they learn to adapt. Help with resilience and adaptability first, then give them real-world projects in their own function using AI, with someone who has done it before guiding their discovery. Our best coaches on it are actually the less technically inclined. They have learned to make GPTs, but they are much better at framing questions that are not leading questions. Researchers who have done solid clinical research are probably some of the best, because AI will often take what you have said and build on it. It is like designing a research study. ### Adaptation, and what comes next Jesse Hopps: I think we are entering an age of disruption like we have never seen before, and the ability of human beings to positively adapt to the environment matters more than it ever has. So I am really passionate about getting Paul's life's work in front of the world, to help with the amount of adaptation that is going to have to happen as people reskill. A lot of knowledge worker jobs are going to go away. Those people are going to need to find something to do. Human connection and a sense of purpose are going to be key. But before people find their purpose, they need to be better at dealing with change in the first place. I am grateful I found AQ, and that I found it in a business context where I could use it to help people at scale. I am hopeful that through this platform and others we can get more people understanding their own relationship with change and adversity, and strengthening it. Not only for their job, but for their family and their community.