Marketing Leadership minus the hype 6: The leadership gap

Posted by Mike O'Brien on May 29, 2026 in Postcards from the digital frontier | Leave a comment

Why the institutions developing marketing leaders are producing the wrong capability for the moment that matters

The belief this piece is challenging

The assumption most organisations operate on, implicitly if not explicitly, is that the marketing leadership gap is a resourcing problem. That if organisations invested more in training, if universities built stronger industry relationships, if developing leaders attended better programmes, the capability gap would close. The solution, on this reading, is more of the same, delivered with greater intensity and better design.

That assumption is wrong. And understanding why it is wrong is the argument this piece makes.

The gap is not a matter of investment intensity. It is a structural consequence of a training system that has been built, refined, and validated in close relationship with the extraction model this series has been arguing against. More investment in that system does not close the gap. It widens it, by producing more of the capability the moment does not need and less of the capability it does.

The problem that has been present throughout

There is a problem sitting underneath every argument this series has made, and it has been present throughout without being named directly.

The series has argued that marketing leadership requires a specific and demanding set of capabilities: the ability to make the long-horizon investment case for brand coherence, to exercise genuine cross-functional influence over the operational decisions that determine whether a brand is experienced as authentic, to build direct customer relationships that reduce platform dependency, to protect the cognitive conditions that make strategic thinking possible, and to develop the kind of epistemic authority that travels independently of algorithmic recommendation.

Every one of those capabilities is real, important, and increasingly urgent. And every one of them is almost entirely absent from the formal training infrastructure responsible for developing the next generation of marketing leaders.

That is not a coincidence. It is a structural consequence of a training system built in close relationship with the extraction model the series has been arguing against. Universities have designed curricula around the skills employers say they need. Employers have said they need people who can operate within existing systems. And the systems those employers are operating within are precisely the ones this series has argued are consuming the human capability marketing depends on.

The result is a pipeline producing leaders who are technically sophisticated, platform literate, and strategically dependent on frameworks that are already becoming obsolete. Not because the institutions involved are negligent. Because the relationship between those institutions and the industry they serve has been optimised for the wrong outcome.

This piece is addressed to three audiences: the senior leaders responsible for developing their teams, the universities and business schools responsible for developing the profession, and the next generation of marketing leaders responsible, in the absence of adequate institutional support, for developing themselves. The argument is the same for all three, and it begins with the capability that makes every other argument in this series actionable.

The capability the system is not building

Cross-functional influence is not a personality trait or a communication style. It is a structural capability: the ability to make marketing’s contribution legible, credible, and relevant in rooms where marketing’s standing is limited and where the decisions that actually determine brand coherence, customer experience, and long-horizon value creation are being made.

It is the capability that makes the authenticity argument actionable. Closing the distance between what a brand claims and what it does requires authority in product, service, pricing, employment practice, and operational decision-making. Without genuine cross-functional influence those conversations either do not happen or happen without marketing’s voice carrying meaningful weight.

It is the capability that makes the measurement philosophy argument possible. Building the internal case for long-horizon investment in brand trust requires the ability to speak the CFO’s language, to translate marketing’s contribution into the terms of capital allocation, risk management, and compounding commercial return. That is not a communications challenge. It is a financial literacy challenge that most marketing training programmes treat as peripheral rather than foundational.

It is the capability that makes the platform sovereignty argument something other than an interesting idea. Building direct customer relationship infrastructure requires organisational mandate that extends well beyond the marketing department. Recovering that mandate, in organisations that have progressively narrowed marketing’s scope over the past decade, requires the kind of cross-functional credibility that is built over years through demonstrated commercial seriousness rather than through any training programme.

And it is, not coincidentally, the capability most systematically absent from the training infrastructure at every level. University marketing programmes do not develop it because it requires organisational experience that academic settings cannot simulate adequately. Agency career ladders do not develop it because agency structures are organised around client service rather than cross-functional commercial leadership. Corporate marketing academies do not develop it because they are designed to make people more effective within existing systems rather than more influential over systems they do not control.

The question worth asking is why. And the answer points directly toward a shift in organisational power that has been accelerating for a decade.

How marketing lost the room

The CMO role has not been gradually de-prioritised. It has been deliberately dismembered, and the organisations that made those decisions are now living with the strategic consequences.

The rise of the chief digital officer, the chief data officer, the chief customer officer, and the chief growth officer was presented in each case as a solution to a capability gap. In aggregate, it was a systematic transfer of commercial authority away from the function responsible for understanding customers and toward functions responsible for managing systems. Each new C-suite role took a piece of what was previously marketing’s territory: digital strategy, data governance, customer experience, growth architecture. The cumulative effect has been a marketing function whose remaining scope is increasingly confined to communications, campaigns, and channel management.

The people who made those decisions were not wrong to identify the gaps. They were wrong about the solution. Creating a new function to own customer experience does not solve the problem of an organisation that does not genuinely understand its customers. It creates a new silo with a new mandate and a new set of incentives, and it removes the function most capable of bridging the gap between commercial strategy and human understanding from the rooms where that gap matters most.

Platform dependency accelerated the narrowing. A marketing function whose primary activity is managing spend across platforms whose rules are set elsewhere is a function whose strategic contribution has been reduced to channel optimisation. That is a different role from the one that commands genuine influence over product strategy, pricing decisions, and the operational choices that determine whether a brand is experienced as coherent. It is a role that can be held accountable for metrics it does not control and excluded from decisions it cannot influence, which is precisely the condition that produces both short CMO tenure and the organisational standing problem this piece is examining.

Attribution-based measurement reinforced both. When marketing’s value is made legible primarily through short-cycle conversion metrics, marketing’s credibility in conversations about long-horizon investment is structurally undermined. A function that can demonstrate the return on last quarter’s paid search spend but cannot credibly quantify the commercial value of brand trust accumulated over years will consistently lose budget arguments to those that can. And a function that consistently loses budget arguments loses organisational standing with it.

The result is a self-reinforcing dynamic. Narrowing mandate reduces cross-functional standing. Reduced standing makes the case for broader mandate harder to make. Shorter tenure prevents the sustained relationship-building that cross-functional influence requires. And the training system, taking its cues from the organisations it serves, prepares people for the narrowed role rather than the broader one.

Recovering cross-functional authority requires challenging that dynamic at a level most organisations find uncomfortable. It requires a CEO who understands that marketing’s function is not channel management but the stewardship of the conditions that produce genuine brand value. Or a CMO who can make that case compellingly enough to redefine the function’s scope from within. Neither comes from a training programme. Both require commercial and political sophistication that the current development infrastructure is not built to produce.

What universities are actually building

The relationship between marketing education and industry is producing a specific and predictable outcome, and it is worth naming that outcome directly rather than in the polite language of curriculum review.

Universities design marketing programmes in close relationship with employers. Employers say they need graduates who can operate within existing systems: people with platform proficiency, data literacy, campaign management capability, and the ability to produce and report on marketing activity in the formats that existing governance structures require. Universities produce those graduates. The relationship is validated by employment rates and employer satisfaction surveys that measure proximity to current practice rather than preparation for future leadership. And the cycle continues.

The problem is not the relationship with industry. The problem is the nature of that relationship. It is a relationship optimised for the present tense of a profession that needs leadership capable of thinking in the future tense. It produces people equipped for the extraction model at precisely the moment the extraction model is failing.

The curriculum gap that is most consequential and most rarely acknowledged is the absence of genuine financial literacy as a strategic capability. Most marketing graduates cannot make a credible long-horizon investment case in the language a CFO uses. They can produce a campaign ROI calculation within an attribution model. They cannot build the commercial argument for investing in brand trust over three years when short-cycle metrics cannot see the return. That is not a peripheral competency gap. It is the gap that makes every other argument in this series impossible to make internally, and it is a gap that most marketing curricula treat as someone else’s responsibility.

The second significant gap is the almost complete absence of organisational theory and political dynamics from marketing leadership development. Cross-functional influence requires understanding how power moves through organisations, how decisions get made in the absence of consensus, how credibility is built across functions with different languages and different incentive structures, and how to make arguments that land in rooms where the speaker has limited formal authority. That content exists in organisational behaviour courses. It is rarely integrated into marketing leadership development in ways that connect it to the specific challenges marketing leaders face.

The third gap is the most visible and the most actively harmful. The proliferation of platform certifications within marketing curricula – Google, Meta, HubSpot, Salesforce, and their equivalents – is not neutral content provision. It is preparation for platform dependency presented as professional development. Teaching these certifications without the critical context this series has developed, without examining what the platform relationship costs, who controls the terms of that relationship, and what the alternative investment would require, is not serving the students receiving them. It is preparing them to be effective tenants in a feudal system without telling them that tenancy is a choice.

A different kind of industry relationship would look quite different from the one most business schools currently maintain. It would develop genuine critical distance alongside practical competence: teaching students not only how platforms work but what the platform relationship costs and what the alternatives require. It would treat financial and commercial literacy as foundational rather than optional. It would include organisational behaviour and political dynamics as core content, not electives. And it would address the philosophy of knowledge seriously, because the epistemic authority this series argues for cannot be built by people who have never been asked to examine how knowledge is constructed and contested.

That is closer to the model professional schools use in medicine and law, where formation includes developing the judgement to identify when standard practice is wrong, than to the current marketing education model, which treats proximity to current practice as the primary measure of educational value.

What senior leaders should actually be building

The leaders who want to develop cross-functional capability in their teams are doing so in conditions that make genuine development genuinely difficult, and acknowledging that difficulty honestly is more useful than prescribing a development model that assumes conditions the system has removed.

The apprenticeship infrastructure that developed strategic capability in previous generations has been substantially dismantled. Entry-level roles that taught strategic thinking through proximity to complexity are disappearing as AI automates the junior tasks those roles contained. The volume and variety of junior work that built strategic reasoning through doing is no longer available in most marketing organisations in the form that made it developmentally useful. And the budget and time for deliberate development are precisely the kinds of long-horizon investments that short tenure structures and quarterly extraction targets make hardest to sustain.

That context matters because the development problem facing senior leaders is not primarily a knowledge problem. It is a structural problem. The question is not which development programme to run. It is what organisational conditions to create in the absence of the scaffolding that made development possible before.

Three things are worth building deliberately.

The first is genuine cross-functional exposure in conditions of real consequence. Not training programmes that send marketing people on finance courses, though financial literacy matters, but genuine access to the commercial language and decision-making logic of other functions where something is actually at stake. The marketing leader who creates real dialogue with product, finance, and operations – rather than managing the interface between them – is doing something qualitatively different from standard people development. It means developing commercial credibility before putting developing leaders in those rooms, which means investing in financial and organisational literacy that most marketing training has not built. The cost of that investment is visible. The cost of not making it is invisible until the function finds itself absent from the decisions that matter.

The second is rebuilding the junior pipeline. The disappearance of entry-level roles is not only a social problem for the next generation. It is a strategic problem for the organisations removing them. The mid-level and senior capability that those roles would have developed over five to ten years will not exist in the organisations that have eliminated them. A marketing function that has automated its junior tier has also automated the development process that produced its future senior leaders. That is a long-horizon cost that does not appear in the short-cycle metrics justifying the automation decision – which makes it exactly the kind of invisible value destruction the measurement piece was arguing against. The investment case for maintaining the junior pipeline is the same case the series has been making throughout: the compounding return on human capability development is real, durable, and largely invisible to the measurement infrastructure most organisations are currently using.

The third is sharing genuine authority rather than providing guidance. The apprenticeship model that worked in previous generations was not primarily about formal mentoring or structured programmes. It was about proximity to genuine strategic thinking in conditions of real commercial consequence. Recreating that in an AI-disrupted environment requires putting developing leaders in rooms where strategic decisions are being made, giving them genuine responsibility for outcomes rather than executional tasks, and creating feedback loops that develop judgement rather than simply skill. That is not a training initiative. It is an organisational design choice – and it is a harder and more important commitment than any formal programme, because it requires senior leaders to share something they are typically reluctant to share: not knowledge, but authority.

What the next generation needs to build for themselves

This section is addressed directly to the developing leader reading this, and it begins with an honest account of the situation they are in.

You are entering a profession that the evidence in this series suggests is structured to exhaust rather than develop you. The junior roles that would have taught you strategic thinking through doing are disappearing. The training infrastructure around you is largely producing the wrong capability for the moment that matters. The organisations you will work in have been progressively narrowing the mandate and shortening the tenure of the leaders whose development paths you might otherwise follow. And the burnout data suggests that the profession is consuming people faster than it is developing them.

That is not a reason for despair. It is the context for a different kind of development model: one that is self-directed rather than institutional, cross-disciplinary rather than functionally narrow, and oriented toward building the capabilities the system is not building rather than optimising the ones it is.

Four capabilities are worth building deliberately and independently.

Financial and commercial literacy developed beyond the marketing function. The ability to read a P&L, to understand how capital allocation decisions are made at board level, and to translate marketing’s contribution into the language of business value creation is the single most powerful cross-functional capability a developing marketing leader can build. It is the capability that makes you credible in rooms where marketing’s standing is limited. It is the capability that makes the long-horizon investment case possible. And it is almost entirely absent from marketing training at every level. Building it requires deliberate effort outside the marketing brief: reading financial reporting, understanding how investment cases are constructed, developing the ability to speak in the language of the functions that control resource allocation.

Genuine intellectual range developed through serious reading outside the marketing canon. The series has argued throughout for epistemic authority built on real intellectual engagement rather than content production. Developing that requires engagement with economics, behavioural science, organisational theory, and the philosophy of knowledge – the kind of primary evidence that shapes thinking rather than validates existing positions. The developing leader who reads Varoufakis on platform economics, Kahneman on decision-making, Mayer on corporate purpose, and Raworth on the boundaries of sustainable economic activity is building a quality of understanding that no certification programme produces and that compounds into genuine strategic capability over time.

Political and organisational intelligence developed through deliberate observation. Understanding how decisions actually get made in organisations, where power sits, how credibility is built across functions with different languages and different objectives, and how to make arguments that land in rooms where you have limited formal authority, is a capability developed through attention rather than instruction. It requires treating every organisational environment as a learning context – not just for the marketing brief but for the political and commercial dynamics shaping the decisions being made around you. The developing leader who pays this kind of attention consistently builds a quality of organisational understanding that cannot be taught in a classroom and that becomes increasingly valuable as their career advances.

An independent intellectual voice built through genuine public thinking. The epistemic authority argument made in the fourth piece of this series applies to developing leaders as directly as it applies to organisations. The next generation leader who builds a genuine point of view, who says true things about the industry even when those things are inconvenient, who defends positions under pressure rather than retreating to safe consensus, and who develops a reputation for intellectual seriousness rather than technical competence, is building something that no platform certification can replicate, no algorithm can substitute for, and no competitor can quickly copy. That is a long-horizon investment in personal authority that compounds in the same way the series has argued brand authority compounds: slowly, invisibly, and then decisively.

None of these capabilities will be fully developed by any institution you work within or study at. That is the honest reality of the training gap this piece has examined. But none of them are beyond the reach of a developing leader who understands what they are building and why, and who is willing to invest in the capabilities the system is not providing.

Four questions worth sitting with

For universities and business schools. Does your current industry relationship develop critical distance alongside practical competence, or does it primarily validate proximity to existing practice? Would the employers you work with most closely recognise the kind of marketing leader the moment requires – and if they would not, what does that tell you about the relationship’s design?

For senior leaders. What are the three most important cross-functional conversations your marketing function is currently absent from, and what would genuine credibility in those conversations require? That gap is both a development priority and an organisational design question, and solving it requires changes to both.

For universities and developing leaders equally. What would a marketing leadership curriculum look like if it were designed to produce leaders capable of the investment model this series argues for, rather than leaders optimised for the extraction model it critiques? And what would need to change – in the curriculum, in the industry relationship, and in the assessment structures – to make that curriculum possible?

For developing leaders. What capability are you building that the institutions around you are not developing, and what evidence would tell you that you are building it seriously rather than simply performing its development? The answer to the second question matters as much as the answer to the first.

The development imperative

The organisations that will build the leadership the moment requires will not find it ready-made in the graduate market, produced by standard corporate development programmes, or emerging naturally from the current training infrastructure. They will need to build it deliberately, against the grain of a system optimised for something else, over time horizons that most governance structures make difficult to sustain.

The next generation of marketing leaders who understand this earliest – who build the financial literacy, the intellectual range, the organisational intelligence, and the independent voice that the institutions around them are not building – will find themselves equipped for a version of marketing leadership that most of their peers are not prepared for. Not because they followed a better training programme, but because they understood what the moment required and built it themselves.

The work is self-directed. The investment is long. The return is real.

Further reading

Roger Martin, The Responsibility Virus – rotman.utoronto.ca | Colin Mayer, Prosperity – sbs.ox.ac.uk | Henry Mintzberg on management education – mintzberg.org | Chartered Institute of Marketing on professional development – cim.co.uk | Marketing Week on CMO authority and tenure – marketingweek.com | Harvard Business Review on cross-functional leadership – hbr.org | WARC on marketing effectiveness and commercial literacy – warc.com | Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow | Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics | Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism