Interim Chief Integration Officer — Value Agenda (Consumer and Retail)

The thesis has to survive contact with trading

A deal thesis is written before anyone has run the combined business. Integration is where its assumptions meet stores that must open, orders that must ship and customers who notice nothing except when something breaks. The Interim Chief Integration Officer holds those three things together: the thesis the Board Strategy Committee approved, the integration work meant to deliver it, and the continuity of everyday trading while both are in motion.

Decision rights for the combined business

Reporting to the Board Strategy Committee, you hold executive authority rather than a coordinating brief. You set who decides what during integration, with explicit limits on what local leadership may settle alone. As the two businesses combine, you decide which numbers judge investment, capacity and control. You decide which inherited commitments survive, which are held and which close; you can block a plan that dumps cost or exposure on a team without its consent, or decline an investment case silent on its users, its dependencies and the ways a cutover might fail. You approve the leadership structure for the combined business and settle quarrels between the committee and the heads of trading before any budget is released. Your first visible win here could well be an integration workstream you halted, not one you launched, and you should be ready to defend that call with evidence.

What continuity means in this sector

In consumer and retail, continuity is judged by the customer: stock where it should be, orders that arrive, returns that are honoured, and prices and promises that stay consistent across channels through every cutover. A sound integration plan states, for each cutover, what must not fail, how anyone would know it was failing and who has the authority to halt it. Integrations rarely go wrong on the big design choices. They go wrong when two teams each assume the other owns a supplier relationship, a data feed or a service commitment.

Twelve months from thesis to proof

The first ninety days should tie the integration plan visibly to the deal thesis, with continuity safeguards in place and an accountable person for every exception, all agreed with the committee. Around month nine integration commitments should have been sorted on evidence into those that proceed, those on hold and those closed, with trading held steady through each cutover completed so far. By month 12 the thesis should have been tested against what integration actually revealed, and the combined business should have a leadership structure and a clear route for raising problems that does not depend on an interim.

A record of integrations that held

Integration, or change of comparable weight, is something you have led where revenue reached $465 million or more, 1,300 people were involved and three countries were in play. ESG transition, platform pivot and professionalisation are where your record will be examined most closely, alongside strategy formation at level 4 and, at level 3, PMO governance, change adoption and the value case. Before letting an exception run on, you have found out who actually bears its cost, and you can lay an unresolved gap before the committee without treating uncertainty as a reason to delay. Halting a workstream will not wait on a blessing from each market, and the outcome is yours to answer for through all 12 months.

From thesis to cutover, in four sittings

It begins in the first week, privately and over video: you and the Board Strategy Committee on how thesis and integration connect. Week 3 is a working half-day with the Risk Committee Chair on keeping trading safe through cutovers. The executive heads of each function, who will live with your sequencing, meet you in person as a panel in week 5, and the directors sit together as a full board to see you in the seventh week. Expect our response in writing no later than four working days after each stage.