Advisory Director — Value Creation (Energy and Utilities)

An adviser who has stopped things

You will have sat with a transformation portfolio long enough to know that its most valuable decisions are often the ones to stop. Your record should include a well-liked programme you closed, the facts that made closing it right, and what the freed people and budget went on to do. Your grasp of energy and utility services rests on decisions that were yours to answer for, one of them a commitment with no case behind it that you ended before it did harm. The organisations you have worked in had two countries in scope, 1,500 people or more, and revenue of at least $635 million, and you can tell a Regional President what remains unresolved in a way that invites a decision rather than another review.

Cost transformation, joint ventures and restructuring are the experiences that will be examined most closely. Each teaches something this seat needs. Cost work teaches which savings are real. A joint venture teaches how a value case behaves when two parties own its assumptions. Restructuring teaches what happens to people and delivery when a portfolio is cut. On capability, the profile asks for level 4 in strategy formation and level 3 in each of PMO governance, value case and change adoption. If you would want every country leader's agreement before recommending a stop, or the standing of the role without two years of accountability for the advice, the fit will be poor.

Advice that shapes the Regional President's calls

The Advisory Director holds no executive authority. The Regional President decides; your counsel exists to make sure those decisions are well founded. In practice you will help settle how portfolio decisions are made and how much latitude regional managers keep, advise on which measures should steer money, people and operating capacity, and recommend which current programmes continue, pause or close. You will push back on plans that quietly move cost or risk onto a team that never agreed to it, and on value cases that leave out who must adopt the work, which other programmes it leans on and the price of failure. Your counsel will also cover who leads which part of the programme and how problems surface, and you will help resolve disagreements with operating managers before any budget is released.

An adviser's influence comes from being early and being specific. Stop rules are the clearest case. A rule written before an initiative starts, stating what evidence by what date would end it, is easy to agree and hard to evade later; a rule written after the money is spent is a negotiation. Drafting those rules well, and holding the portfolio to them when sentiment pulls the other way, is most of the job.

What two years of good counsel should leave behind

Ninety days in, the Regional President should hold your written advice on how transformation decisions are made and on the stop rule each initiative has to meet. Around month nine, every value case in the portfolio should have passed through a review with you for adoption, operating dependencies and downside before further funding is agreed. By month 24, the portfolio should be governed by stop rules that are actually used, and your recommendations on what to keep, hold or close should be visible in the decisions the Regional President has taken.

Meeting the people you would advise

The process opens in week one with a video call held in confidence between you and the Regional President. Week three is a working session in which the Audit Committee Chair tests how you would evidence a stop rule. Week five brings a face-to-face session with executives who together lead the company's main functions; in the seventh week you meet the directors together. You will hear how each stage went within three working days.