Depending on the organization you find yourself leading, you might suffer the excruciating pain of endless planning cycles, the torturous pain of hopelessly slow execution, the bewildering pain of gaps in data, the savage pain of angry stakeholders, the demoralizing pain of disengaged employees, the debilitating pain of broken technology, or the shameful pain of leading an organization that has committed itself to performing low-value work.

Perhaps you feel it all. Perhaps—more than anything—you are feeling the pain of leading an organizational transformation whose progress is impeded by shoddy technology, poor data, undervalued work, insufficient innovation, angry stakeholders, or long times-to-market.

We empathize. We have suffered ourselves through all these issues at one time or another over our long careers as operating executives. But as consultants and coaches to CMOs and their leadership teams, we want to help marketers achieve clarity and conviction about the underlying problems that are causing pain and frustrating transformation.

Just as a physician seeks to diagnose a patient’s condition to treat a disease and not just its symptoms, the discerning CMO must look beyond the presenting symptoms to reach an understanding of their organization’s underlying chronic states that impede marketing transformation.

We work with the C-suite and their marketing leaders in industries as diverse as banking, insurance, healthcare, brokerage, technology, pharmaceuticals, media and energy utilities. We work with small companies and with very large ones.

We have studied the pathologies of modern marketing organizations. In this paper, we describe ten organizational archetypes that represent recurring impediments to any sort of marketing and operating model transformation. These patterns recur regardless of company size, product line, customer type or industry vertical.

The good news: with the right actions, they can all be treated.

The first step to faster growth is deeper self awareness.