Interim Group Chief Executive Officer — Renewal

From many local plans to one operating agenda

Local plans are rarely wrong individually. The trouble comes when they are added together and no one can say which of them the group is actually committed to, or who answers for the result. The interim group chief executive is there to bring those plans into one accountable operating agenda.

The appointment carries executive authority. Under it, you will set which decisions sit at group level and how much local leaders may decide for themselves. You will also decide what evidence a call on funding, capacity or control must stand on. Each commitment will proceed, pause or close on your word, and any scheme that shifts cost or risk elsewhere with nobody to own it is turned away. Investment will be declined where the case says nothing about how the change takes hold, what it depends on, or its downside. You will determine the leadership structure and the escalation route, and settle conflicts with operating leaders while money and people are still uncommitted.

Family-owned businesses tend to give this work a particular rhythm. Decisions often carry the weight of long relationships, and owners usually think in longer horizons than any executive term. An interim chief executive who respects both, while still insisting that every commitment has an owner and a case, earns the room to make hard calls. On a technology platform those calls are made while the product keeps shipping and customers keep relying on it; there is no pause button while authority moves. Leaders who succeed here have usually refused funding at least once when adoption and downside were left unstated, then rebuilt the capacity the business actually needed.

The renewal across twelve months

As the first ninety days close, local plans should be consolidated into one group operating agenda, with the thresholds local leaders retain agreed. Around month nine, anything outside that agenda should be on hold or wound down, and every remaining commitment should belong to a specific leader. By month 12 group leadership and escalation should be settled, with the agenda reviewed on a cadence the organisation can sustain on its own.

A leader for a family-owned group

Your knowledge of technology and digital platforms comes from decisions that carried your name, including a thinly supported commitment you halted before its effects were felt. Revenue of $830 million, 1,400 people and four countries describe the minimum size behind that record. Joint venture, professionalisation and succession experience are examined, together with strategy formation at level 4 and, at level 3, risk judgement, setting an operating cadence and owning a P&L. You can explain an open gap to the Board Chair and still recommend how to proceed, a single objecting country head will not keep a commitment alive, and the result is yours for the full 12 months.

The Board Chair meets you first, on a video call held in confidence, at the start of week one. The Nomination and Governance Committee Chair follows in the third week for a session on how the renewal would be run. In the fifth week you meet in person a panel of executive leaders, one from each function, and the full board of directors brings things to an end in the seventh week. Written word on each stage comes within two working days.