The Decisions You Both Think You Own

The packaging change died in its fourth meeting. Product had built the tiers and finance had modeled the margin. You had the positioning and the launch plan, and everyone in the room agreed the change was right. The meeting ended the way the three before it ended, with someone suggesting you socialize it more broadly first. Six weeks later reps were quoting the new tiers in live deals and the pricing page still showed the old ones.

Nobody in that room disagreed about strategy. There was no document saying who gets to say yes.

The CMO Survey ran a version of that question past 308 US marketing leaders in January 2026, 97% of them VP level or above. One item asks what marketing is primarily responsible for. Of the 252 who answered it, brand came back at 94.4% and digital marketing at 93.3%. Then the list drops. Lead generation is at 67.1%, customer insight 56.7%, revenue growth 42.5%, customer experience 40.1%, e-commerce 33.7%, customer relationship management 30.6%, pricing 28.2% (The CMO Survey Topline Report, 2026).

The top of that list is settled. The middle is where a decision belongs to marketing at one company and to somebody else at the next one, which your peers know as well as you do.

Scope grew faster than the wiring

Marketing's formal scope moved up almost everywhere in one year. Responsibility for revenue growth rose 10.3 points, public relations 9.9, customer insight 8.8 (The CMO Survey Highlights and Insights, 2026). Marketing leaders sit in more board meetings than they did. On paper the function gained ground.

The wiring stayed where it was. On a seven-point scale, marketing rates its collaboration with finance at 4.8, against 5.8 with sales, and the CFO partnership on building a business case for marketing spend has moved from 4.3 to 4.5 over four years. The survey says the depth of integration "has not kept pace with the breadth of responsibility" (The CMO Survey Highlights and Insights, 2026).

That combination produces the fourth meeting. Two executives end up holding the same decision in good faith, and nothing surfaces the overlap until they are in a room disagreeing about a launch date.

The chart you already have

Most of the companies I work with ran this play once. Somebody built a RACI at an offsite and it lives in a doc nobody has opened since.

Harvard Business Review's July-August 2026 issue opens its decision-rights piece on twelve executives at a global technology company gathered to decide whether to create a chief innovation officer role. The discussion "quickly devolved into a power struggle, with several participants arguing loudly and others quietly checking out." After ninety minutes of debate the meeting ended without a decision. Lindy Greer, Jennifer Jordan and Maxim Sytch write that organizations use tools like RACI to clarify who provides input, who decides and who carries it out, and that "in practice these frameworks often fail" (HBR, July-August 2026).

In the same issue, Julia Dhar, Kristy Ellmer and Philip Jameson name a false alignment trap, where senior leaders believe they agree on why, what and how to change when they do not (HBR, July-August 2026). Their remedy runs before the work does. Define the exact decisions that have to be made, who makes them, and how (HBR, May 2026).

Bain sells a fix for exactly this. RAPID assigns five roles to any decision: Recommend, Agree, Perform, Input, Decide. Ideally one person holds the D (Bain, October 2023). Across almost 800 companies, the firm found a 95% correlation between excelling at making and executing key decisions and landing in the top tier of financial results, measured on revenue growth, return on capital and total shareholder return (Bain, March 2011).

The tools work when someone fills them in. I have never seen one filled in for the decisions marketing actually loses, so here is that page.

In Partnership with Attio

Some teams never seem to stop moving. They're on Attio, the agentic CRM.

The Contested Eight

The page has eight rows, one named owner each, and the condition that moves that owner. The defaults are mine. They hold until the stated condition fires. Two of the conditions carry numbers you should reset for your own company, the 15% reallocation threshold and the 10% revenue-plan trigger. Set each one just under the level at which your CFO already asks for a re-forecast, so the flip fires before the escalation does.

Four rows draw most of the argument.

Pricing sits with the CFO on purpose. Marketing is primarily responsible for it at 28.2% of companies, so a sheet that reassigns the most sensitive number in the P&L on its first row will not get signed, and you will lose the other seven rows defending it. Take the must-agree seat instead. It is a real veto, exercised before the decision lands, and it buys you a year of evidence to reopen the row at the next planning cycle.

Attribution gets two owners deliberately. One model decides what gets funded next year and one decides what gets bid tomorrow. The finance model is slow and defensible, the channel model fast and directional and wrong more often. Forcing them into one number hands the whole question to whoever controls the model, which is the fight I described in The CFO Problem. Reconcile the two once a quarter in writing and put the remaining gap in the memo.

The pipeline row is the one I have watched cost the most, and I made the full argument for it in The RevOps Land Grab. On this page it is one row. Put the CRO in the Decides cell and spend the argument on the flip condition.

Brand voice has no flip condition. It needs a row because of AI. Marketing leaders report AI running 24.2% of marketing activities, up from 13.1% in 2024, and they project 55.9% within three years (The CMO Survey Highlights and Insights, 2026). Much of what your company says next year will be said by a system somebody configured. Leave the row blank and the voice gets written by whoever deployed the agent, usually in product or support, in a prompt nobody reviewed.

The meeting that signs it

You convene it. A rights conversation the CEO calls reads as a reorganization, and everyone shows up armed.

Book ninety minutes, one agenda item, six people at most, with the CFO and the CRO in the room. Send the invite as planning-cycle preparation and attach the sheet, because an invite that reads as a negotiation over authority gets declined or gets a delegate. A blank page turns into the twelve-executive power struggle HBR opened on, because "who should own this" has no natural stopping point. A pre-filled page asks whether this specific default is wrong, and that question resolves in minutes.

Replace every role in the cells with the name of a person before anyone leaves. A default only moves when the person taking it says so in the room. Write "Sales" in a cell and the row is owned by nobody, and whoever moves first inherits it by accident three months later.

Record the sheet as amended, the date, the flip conditions, and the rows nobody settled. Send it to the CEO inside 24 hours as a decision memo, with each unsettled row written as two positions of one paragraph each and a request for a ruling by a named date. When a peer refuses a row outright, write the refusal in as their position and let the CEO rule, because an open row on paper costs you less than a row you conceded in the hallway.

Put the sheet on the planning calendar once a year, and reopen any row you have to look up twice in a quarter.

The bill for leaving it blank

Most marketing leaders are already under pressure to prove the function's value, with 58.8% naming the CEO as a source, 55.5% the CFO and 44.7% the board. Of those feeling it, 70.6% say they respond by shifting toward short-term impact over long-run gains, and marketers have spent roughly twice as much time managing the present as preparing for the future every year since 2019 (The CMO Survey Highlights and Insights, 2026). The economy explains some of that. Unowned decisions explain more of it than most CMOs count, because every one gets relitigated by whoever missed the last meeting.

Marketing's scope grew 10.3 points on revenue growth in a single year while its working relationship with finance sits at 4.8 out of 7. Gaps that size get closed by a reorg, and a reorg fills every row on that page without asking you.

There is an argument on your calendar this month that maps to one of the eight rows. Fill that row in before the meeting and bring the page.