Advisory Chair — Operating Model and Scale

A chair who has built leadership teams before

The Advisory Chair should be someone who has designed the leadership of an industrial business for a new phase and then watched it work, or fail, under load. You have been through succession, cost transformation and professionalisation in organisations whose revenue was $530 million or above, with 1,300 or more people and a presence in seven or more countries. You have held a seat where practice differed from plant to plant and obscured the real risk, and you know that leadership structure is often the reason such differences persist.

Strategy formation at level 4 comes first; P&L ownership, operating cadence and risk judgement are needed at level 3. You can tell a plant that truly needs its own way of working from one that is just keeping an old habit. You can tell an investment committee what remains unresolved without using uncertainty as delay. And you accept that your most useful early contribution might be advice that led the committee to end something, advice you can back with evidence.

What the committee will ask of you

The Advisory Chair gives counsel; the Investment Committee decides. For 12 months you will help that committee settle how decisions are taken and where the discretion of plant and country heads should stop. You will advise on what a request for capital, capacity or a control change should have to prove, and recommend whether each commitment continues, pauses or ends. You will question plans that leave exposure with no one answerable, and investment cases that leave out adoption, dependencies or the downside. Above all, you will counsel on who should lead what, how problems should rise and how often the committee is reported to, and help the committee and plant heads work through disagreements before resources are committed.

For a listed manufacturer, the leadership structure is also a signal to investors. Advice that is sound internally but hard to explain externally is incomplete.

Twelve months of counsel

Over the first ninety days your advice to the Investment Committee should set out the leadership roles, decision rights and reporting cadence the next phase needs. Around month nine the proposed structure and the route for raising problems should have been reviewed and challenged, and the committee's open questions resolved. By month 12 the leadership structure for scale should be adopted and its first reporting cycle reviewed, with the lessons fed back to the committee.

If you would need every country head's agreement before advising that something stop, or you want influence without staying answerable for the full 12 months, you will find this frustrating.

The committee, a chair, the executives, the board

The Investment Committee meets you first, confidentially over video, during week one. The Risk Committee Chair then spends week three on a live question with you. In week five you sit down in person with executives who each lead a function, and week seven takes you to the full board. Our assessment arrives in writing within four working days of each meeting.