The Drugs Don’t Work

"The drugs don't work, they just make you worse…" — The Verve weren’t singing about business, but they might as well have been.

In today’s organisations, the “drugs” are our investments in AI, martech, and transformation programmes — powerful tools capable of extraordinary things. Yet, for many businesses, these tools don’t deliver their promised cure. The reason is rarely the technology itself. It’s the way organisations are structured, led, and connected.

Silos: The Unseen Corporate Disease

The latest research from Optimizely reveals what people across business already know: they’re often excluded from the decisions that most affect their work. Three-quarters of UK marketers say senior leaders make decisions without consulting those closest to the action. It’s tempting to see this as a marketing problem — but it’s not. Speak to operations, technology, or even customer service, and the story is the same.

Silos may have once been an unfortunate by-product of scale. Today, they’re an active threat to performance. In many organisations, leadership sets the vision, but the teams charged with delivering it have neither the context nor the authority to act decisively. The result is slow execution, duplicated effort, and wasted investment.

The Irony of AI in a Siloed World

Here’s the paradox: AI is the most powerful connective force business has ever had. It can unify disparate datasets, tell coherent cross-functional stories, and uncover patterns humans didn’t even think to look for.

Gartner’s 2024 research shows that 71% of martech and AI initiatives underperform due to organisational misalignment — not technical limitations. The same is true beyond marketing: PwC’s 2023 Operations Survey found that 65% of operations leaders believe siloed decision-making is holding back transformation. The very technology designed to integrate our understanding of the business is being undermined by governance models that keep teams apart.

The Cost of ‘Command and Report’ Leadership

Optimizely’s study finds that 81% of marketers are asked to deliver more with fewer resources, while almost one in five spend more time reporting than executing.

This is the “command and report” model — the modern equivalent of managing a Formula 1 team by reading yesterday’s race report. It’s reactive, risk-averse, and wholly unsuited to the pace at which markets, technology, and customer expectations now evolve.

Over-the-Top Leadership: The Missing Layer

What’s needed is Over-the-Top Leadership — a senior leadership team that doesn’t just oversee individual functions but actively integrates them. Academic research supports this: Lawrence and Lorsch’s seminal 1967 work demonstrated that high-performing organisations excel at both differentiation (specialisation) and integration (cross-functional alignment). McKinsey’s 2021 findings go further, suggesting that breaking down silos can yield productivity gains of up to 25%.

Examples in practice:

• Microsoft under Satya Nadella: shifted from product-first to ecosystem-first leadership, integrating engineering, sales, and customer success around “One Microsoft.”

• Unilever’s Sustainability Agenda: leaders integrated supply chain, marketing, and HR to ensure that sustainability wasn’t a department but a system-wide capability.

• Airbnb during COVID-19: leadership didn’t just cut costs but reorganised around the whole system of hosts, guests, and employees, enabling a rapid pivot that preserved long-term brand trust.

  
  

Over-the-Top Leadership means being able to see the whole system — strategy, technology, people, operations, and customer outcomes — as a living, connected organism. It’s about moving from function-first thinking to system-first thinking.

A Framework for Over-the-Top Leadership

To move from commentary to action, leaders can adopt a simple framework:

1. See the System — Map strategy, technology, operations, and customer outcomes on a single page. Identify where silos prevent flow.

2. Integrate Decision-Making — Establish cross-functional squads or “nerve centres” where marketing, operations, finance, and tech decide together, not sequentially.

3. Empower the Edge — Push authority closer to those with the best context (frontline staff, analysts, product managers).

4. Measure Integration, Not Just Output — Track not only performance metrics but collaboration indicators (e.g., shared OKRs, cross-team delivery).

5. Model the Behaviour — Leaders must personally demonstrate cross-boundary working — attending joint reviews, recognising integrated wins, and dismantling turf wars.

   
   

From Technology Investment to Organisational Advantage

AI can tell the richest, most coherent story your business has ever had access to. It can connect the dots between customer behaviour, supply chain performance, operational bottlenecks, and workforce productivity. But it cannot — and will not — deliver that value if the people interpreting its insights are trapped in functional silos, working to conflicting agendas.

Breaking silos is not an HR initiative, nor is it a tech stack optimisation project. It’s a strategic imperative for the modern C-suite.

Because right now, the drugs don’t work. They won’t make you better — in fact, they might make things worse — unless leadership learns to see the whole system, trust the people closest to the action, and integrate strategy, technology, and execution into one cohesive force.