Interim Chief Business Officer — Controls

What dependable delivery looks like at each stage

Three things should be shared by the Investment Committee and the Interim Chief Business Officer after the first ninety days: an agreed way of making delivery decisions, a plan baseline that both sides accept as the yardstick, and a leader answerable for each element of delivery. Agreement on the baseline is the unglamorous foundation. When people disagree about what the plan was, they cannot agree on whether it is being met.

By around month nine, delivery against plan should be reviewed on a fixed rhythm, not convened when something goes wrong. Commitments that are slipping will have been examined individually; those that cannot recover will have been paused or ended, and in every case it will be clear who owns the decision. The goal at this stage is not perfect delivery but predictable delivery, where variances are seen early and explained honestly.

At month 18 operating leaders should be holding delivery against plan themselves, supported by controls and a route for raising problems that work without the interim in the building.

Authority to hold delivery to plan

The Interim Chief Business Officer holds executive authority under the Investment Committee. The officer sets how delivery decisions are made, including the limits within which local leaders act alone, and names the delivery evidence that spending, capacity and control decisions must be based on. They decide which inherited commitments go ahead and which are held or ended. Proposals that would leave a colleague carrying cost or risk they never agreed to will be stopped, and investment will be turned down where its case takes usage for granted, leaves its dependencies unexamined or offers no view of the downside. The officer approves the leadership structure and resolves conflicts between the Investment Committee and operating leaders before budgets are committed.

The operator behind the plan

Your leadership should have spanned at least $600 million in revenue, 1,900 people and eight countries. Professionalisation, platform pivots and turnaround will each be looked at in your record. Professionalisation is the closest fit: you have reset who decides, how money flows and how often delivery is reviewed, so that delivery became a matter of routine rather than heroics. Strategy formation needs to be at level 4, and operating cadence, risk judgement and accountability for a P&L at level 3 each. Operating cadence deserves emphasis, since dependable delivery is in large part the product of a review rhythm that people trust and keep.

With delivery data still patchy, you have taken a decision that could be reversed and refined it as the picture filled in. You can judge where a market's own discretion should stand and where it should give way, and you write that boundary down so others can apply it. You can show an investment committee what is still unknown and recommend a course anyway, and you will stop a commitment that is failing its plan even while some country leaders disagree.

Committee, case, committee again

The process is deliberately compact. In week one the Investment Committee speaks with you by video, in confidence, about what dependable delivery would require. In week two you work through a live case with the Regional President. In week three you return to the Investment Committee, this time face to face. We will set out our view in writing within five working days of each stage.