The five pressures

Any one of the five would have been a decade’s worth of change. They have arrived together. A VUCA world in which instability is the condition rather than the exception. Buyers who have done most of their research before they let a salesperson in the room. Machine buying, in which a growing share of B2B purchasing is agents talking to agents. Shorter product life cycles, which the book calls its commercial heart, because the innovation-obsolescence cycle means every offer ages faster than it used to. And geopolitical shifts that redraw supply chains and tariff schedules between one planning round and the next.

The net effect is not that strategy has become impossible. It is that suppliers simply have to trim their sails more often, and the annual account plan, written once and filed, was designed for weather that no longer exists.