Interim Group Chief Strategy Officer — Renewal

A strategist with a mandate to choose

Group strategy functions are often valued for the options they generate. This appointment is valued for the options it closes. The interim strategy officer is expected to settle the kind of portfolio question that annual planning cycles tend to roll forward from one year to the next, and holds executive authority to do it.

In a state-linked public-interest organisation that work runs against particular currents: service mandates that cannot simply be dropped, procurement rules that slow an exit as much as an entry, and stakeholders whose idea of value is not only financial. A good strategy officer treats those as design constraints rather than reasons to defer.

The executive reach of the seat

You will set who decides which portfolio choices, stating the thresholds that local leadership keeps, and define the evidence that any call on funding, capacity or control has to meet. Group commitments will go ahead, pause or end on your judgement, and anything that transfers cost or risk while leaving nobody to answer for it is blocked. Investment will be rejected where the case is silent on uptake, on the other workstreams it leans on, or on the downside. You will confirm who leads and how issues escalate, settle disagreements with operating leaders, and run the board's rhythm for progress, exceptions and outstanding decisions.

Eighteen months from deferred choices to a working cadence

The first ninety days should leave the committee holding an agreed allocation of portfolio decisions and clear criteria for keeping, pausing or ending group commitments. Nine months in, at month nine, portfolio choices should be taken on the agreed evidence as a matter of course, with blocked proposals on record alongside the people accountable for them. By month 18 the board's cadence for portfolio progress and outstanding decisions should run without leaning on the interim strategy officer at all.

A strategist who has closed options

Your grasp of public-interest and regulated services was earned on decisions that carried your signature, one of them a poorly evidenced commitment you halted before it did harm. Every business on your record had at least $295 million in revenue, 1,700 people and a presence in four or more countries, and at that size the baselines you set held up when a board strategy committee and the managers running frontline services pushed back. Turnaround, integration and succession experience are examined, together with strategy formation at level 4 and, at level 3, the value case, the adoption of change and the governance of a PMO. You can tell where a local manager's discretion still serves the service and where it should be withdrawn, and you document that line. Where evidence is incomplete, you still give the committee a view and say what would change it. Stopping a commitment does not, for you, require every country head to sign off first.

A compact selection in three steps

Selection moves quickly. During the first week the Board Strategy Committee talks with you confidentially by video. In the second week you and the Regional President work through a live case together, and the third week closes things with an in-person discussion with the executive committee. A written account of each step reaches you inside three working days.