Marketing in the (Great, Big, Messy) Real World: Rewire Your Marketing Organization to Navigate Anything

Are you a marketing leader tired of being held accountable for predictable results in an utterly unpredictable world?

You're not alone. CMOs, VPs, and marketing directors everywhere face the same impossible expectation: deliver measurable, consistent outcomes while markets shift overnight, customer behavior fragments, and AI accelerates volatility.

The problem isn’t you. It’s the outdated playbook you've been handed.

The old industrial world is gone. Yet traditional management models still treat marketing like a machine: insert budget, receive results. Marketing is a complex, non-linear system and your old playbook was never designed for today's uncertain environment

Kathleen Schaub—marketing innovator, former CMO, and research analyst—reveals a breakthrough approach rooted in systems thinking and complexity science that finally explains why your best efforts produce unpredictable results and shows you what leaders must do instead to stay credible, strategic, and in control.

In this book, you’ll discover:

Four essential mindset shifts that reframe marketing as an investment, a probability-based leadership model, and an ecosystem to reduce surprises and strengthen executive trust
Better approaches for measurement and ROI so you can defend budget and drive strategic influence
How to build resilience and feedback systems that allow your team to adapt before disruption becomes decline
Marketing leadership is changing. The question is whether you’ll lead the shift or be overtaken by it.