The recent dramatic – and very public – dismissal of Wal-Mart's marketing change agent, Julie Roehm, is just the latest and highest-profile of a long series of marketers booted out by companies that didn't really want to change. (A whiff of scandal added spice to the articles on the front pages of both Advertising Age and the Wall Street Journal, but the real story is the change issue.)

Rumor has it that Coke's Mary Minnick may be next to leave. She was just passed over for the number two job at Coke. The job went to someone previously fired at a bottler for securities violations. That's a pretty good indication that her days of trying to teach a company mired in the tar pits of the past how to evolve may be numbered. And not necessarily numbered in triple digits.

The marketing change agent revolving door is spinning faster and faster, and not just at the Wal-Mart / Coca-Cola top of the food chain. Why?

Simple. A company hires a change agent when the company's in trouble. (If everything was fine, why would they want to change?) "Trouble" in this case almost always means declining sales, market share and/or profit. A company experiencing a problem wants that problem to go away. But the management that got the company into trouble in the first place doesn't really want anything else to change. They want to keep doing things exactly as they always have, but get different results.

Of course some change agents are CEOs. Carly Fiorina was brought in to turn around Hewlett-Packard. Her acquisition of Compaq shook up staid old H-P. (No, a staid tech company is definitely not an oxymoron.) Eventually, Fiorina was fired. She had tinkered with the sacrosanct "H-P way," and that made the board and the principal heir of one of the founders uncomfortable. It's ironic that H-P's recent strong financial performance is the result of changes made by Ms. Fiorina.   

Today the change agent is more likely to be a CMO reporting to the CEO. That way the CEO can get the benefit of needed changes, then jettison the change agent when the entrenched constituencies inside the company, on the board and among customers howl.

For most companies, the ideal change agent would change the numbers and nothing else. And then evaporate.

Change agents, not a breed given to self-doubt, charge ahead and do the job they believe they were hired to do. They usually slaughter herds of sacred cows in the process. Or try to. Because change agents are much more likely to be offered up on the corporate chopping block than the outmoded ways they're trying to eliminate.

Doing what you've always done but expecting a different result is a popular definition of insanity. Perhaps that definition should be expanded to include expecting a change agent to repair a company's problem without changing the way the company functions. Maybe by waving a magic wand over the sales numbers? 

Of course another insanity definition might be a change agent accepting a job at an ossified company and expecting to be the one who finally manages to change it. Because, like the light bulb, the company has to really want to change. And most would rather just wither away.

A first-hand experience

We've been susceptible to delusional expectations, too. A BrainPosse principal took a job as a change agent at an antediluvian ad agency. Although billings went way up, he was unceremoniously ousted by a management horrified by change and a staff terrified of the higher standards needed to achieve it. And, yes, the agency withered away to about one-tenth its former size.

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