Advisory Chair — Operating Model and Delivery (Agribusiness and Food)

A general manager who has already paid for slow decisions

Somewhere in your career you will have run an agribusiness or food business turning over $295 million or more, with at least 1,000 people working across seven countries, and you will remember specific moments when waiting cost more than being wrong. Food businesses are unforgiving in that way: a sourcing decision deferred by a season, or a processing investment argued over for a quarter too long, and the window has closed. Advisers who have lived through that tend to give sharper counsel than those who have only studied it.

The directors will look for range across three kinds of change. Scale-up shows whether you can keep a growing business legible to its owners. A platform pivot shows whether you can move people and money off a familiar model without losing the operation underneath. A joint venture shows whether you can hold a shared agenda with partners whose incentives differ from yours. Alongside that record, the board asks for strategy formation at level 4, and level 3 in each of three supporting disciplines: judging risk, owning a P&L, and keeping an operating cadence. In practice that means building a strategy that survives contact with growers, plants and trading desks, and reading a P&L for what it leaves out.

Counsel that lands before money moves

An Advisory Chair has no executive authority. The influence is earned in the room with the Board of Directors, and it is spent most usefully just before a commitment is made. Much of your work will be helping the board settle which decisions belong to the group and which sit with the people running each market, and then writing those thresholds down clearly enough that nobody has to guess. You will help define the information the board relies on when it allocates investment and operating headroom, and advise on which inherited commitments deserve to keep going. When a proposal quietly shifts cost or exposure onto another part of the business, or a business case is thin on who will actually use the new asset and what happens if it underdelivers, you will say so while the decision is still open. You will also counsel on how the leadership team is shaped, and on settling early any disagreement the directors have with the people running plants and markets, before attrition wears it down.

Two years, read from the board's side of the table

Three months in, the directors should hold one written view of where authority sits across the group's markets, the thresholds each market leader works within, and the facts they will examine before approving investment. By the ninth month, with your counsel, the directors should have worked through every inherited commitment and taken a clear position on each, naming one accountable executive for every commitment they keep. By month 24 the agenda, the leadership structure and the route by which issues climb to the directors should have survived a full board cycle and should hold without you in the room.

Board, risk chair, executives, board again

The opening week brings a confidential conversation over video with the Board of Directors; most of that call is about how you would draw the line between group rules and market judgement. A fortnight later, in the third week, the Risk Committee Chair spends a working session pressing your advice from the risk side. In the fifth week an in-person panel of executive leaders, each running a different function, questions you; they are the people who would have to live with whatever you recommend. The process ends in week seven, when all the directors meet together to conclude. Four working days after each stage, the board sends you its view in writing.