Most businesses chase growth the hard way. They obsess over customer loyalty, lifetime value, and retention while ignoring the fundamental laws that actually drive sustainable expansion.

The result? Wasted budgets, stalled growth, and missed opportunities.

A follow-up to "Corporate Innovation in the Age of AI: Navigating the Hype, the Hypertail, and the Hard Limits"

In my previous piece, I explored how corporate innovation leaders face four key scenarios in the age of AI: the "hypertail" overload of point solutions, the slow burn of transformation, regulatory compliance pressures, and talent bottlenecks.
While these strategic frameworks help navigate the landscape, they miss a more fundamental truth that's becoming increasingly apparent in boardrooms and innovation labs alike.

The real bottleneck isn't AI adoption—it's organisational readiness.

The private equity landscape has fundamentally shifted. With interest rates elevated and valuations at historic highs, the era of financial engineering as the primary value creation lever is over. Today's outperformance comes from execution capabilities—specifically, the ability to transform portfolio companies into high-performance growth platforms through operational excellence.

Yet most PE firms are still approaching marketing and digital transformation with outdated frameworks. They're optimizing for performance marketing metrics when they should be implementing Investment Marketing—treating every marketing dollar as capital allocation with measurable enterprise value impact.