Wolf&Grayson EditorialBoards have never been better at measuring revenue and never been worse at predicting it. Bain & Company found that 86% of executives expected to hit their growth targets in 2025, yet 42% missed their targets. Confidence for 2026 has nevertheless climbed to 91%. That gap is not a forecasting error. It is a governance error, and David R. Lusk, Managing Director and Founder of Evergreen Sales Group, pinpoints its source: boards interrogate the growth number without ever testing whether the organization is capable of producing it. The questions that dominate board meetings are legitimate. What is the target? How much pipeline do we have? Are we going to make the quarter? They are also lagging. By the time they produce an answer, the quarter has been decided by factors nobody in the room had noticed.
The Blind Spot Lives In The Middle
Lusk frames the problem as the Behavior-Execution Gap, and the phrasing is deliberate. “Boards govern the beginning and measure the end. The blind spot is the middle.” Directors set strategy and approve the plan at one end. They review results at the other. What happens in between – whether the people responsible for the growth are consistently doing what the strategy requires – sits outside the standard governance rhythm entirely. When growth slows, the conversation reflexively swings back to strategy. Do we have the right market, the right value proposition, the right sales leader, the right technology, or the right comp plan? Those are all upstream levers, and pulling them feels like action. It rarely is.
The better question, in Lusk’s formulation, is “What has to be true about our organization for this growth number to happen?” That reframing has teeth, because it forces a capability audit rather than a target negotiation. McKinsey & Company’s work on execution describes the components as accountability, coordination and control, capabilities, and motivation. None of those shows up on a pipeline dashboard. Bain has also tied operating model quality directly to results, finding that companies in the top quartile on operating-model indicators posted five-year compound average revenue growth that was 120 basis points higher than bottom-quartile peers. The implication for directors is uncomfortable. Revenue problems surface in the numbers, but they start much earlier, in behavior, and by the time the numbers move, the diagnosis window has closed.
Pipeline Is An Outcome, Culture Is A System
The most common board reaction to a soft quarter is a demand for more pipeline. Lusk treats that as a category mistake. Pipeline is an outcome. Sales culture is one of the systems that produces it. His reframing is blunt: “Before we ask why we don’t have enough pipeline, ask what our organization is doing every day that should be creating it.” He moves boards through three levels:
- Pipeline, meaning: do we have enough opportunities?
- Behavior, meaning: are sellers consistently prospecting, creating customer value, qualifying rigorously, advancing decisions, and coaching opportunities?
- Culture, meaning: does the organization reinforce those behaviors through leadership expectations, accountability, coaching, incentives, and management routines?
Culture here is not a morale metric, and Lusk is careful to strip the word of its soft connotations. “It is the collection of behaviors the organization repeatedly rewards, tolerates, measures, and reinforces.” Tolerates is the operative word. Every commercial organization is reinforcing something, whether or not leadership chose it, and what gets tolerated quietly becomes the standard. That makes it a board issue without making it a board responsibility. Directors should not manage sales behaviors. They should challenge management on whether the commercial environment is producing the behaviors the growth strategy depends on. The question Lusk would put on the agenda: “Do we have a pipeline problem, or do we have an organizational behavior problem that is showing up in the pipeline?” One of those is a quarterly fix. The other is a structural one, and confusing them wastes years.
AI Will Amplify Whatever Already Exists
Boards are betting on organic growth and AI investment simultaneously, and Lusk sees a sequencing conflict most directors have not priced in. AI can accelerate a commercial system. It does not change the behaviors that determine whether growth happens. If sellers struggle to create customer value, prospect consistently, qualify opportunities, engage senior decision-makers, or advance buying decisions, layering AI on top makes the existing system faster rather than better. Lusk is explicit that this is his read of the execution risk rather than a research finding. The sequence he argues for is behavior change, followed by process redesign, AI enablement, scale and, ultimately, organic growth. The sequence most companies are actually following is AI investment, the hope that behavior will change, and the expectation that growth will follow.
What boards should be probing over the next two to three years is narrower than technology sophistication and far harder to answer. “Are we investing in AI before changing the behaviors AI is supposed to amplify?” Lusk extends the argument to what he calls sales intelligence, which he defines not as knowledge but as mindset: the move from “What do I need to sell?” to “What does this customer need to accomplish, and how can I help them get there?” He argues that shift belongs to every employee, not just the sales function. The same AI tools can sharpen decisions or entrench old habits depending on the culture surrounding them. Give a product-focused, transactional, quota-first seller better technology, and you simply enable the same old mindset to operate more efficiently. His closing position is a direct challenge to how most boards currently evaluate commercial investment: “The revenue curve will belong to companies that transform how sellers think, not merely what sellers know.”
Follow David R. Lusk on LinkedIn for more insights on sales culture, commercial execution, and board-level revenue governance.
