Advisory Chair — Operating Model and Controls

The hardest advice is about where to stop

Advising a chief executive on where to compete is comfortable work. Advising on where to step back is not. Every market and offering has a sponsor, a history and a team that believes in it, and the case for withdrawal is usually made with less data and more courage than the case for growth. The Advisory Chair will spend much of this 12-month engagement on exactly that kind of judgement.

Several calls recur. Is a weak offering weak because the market is wrong, or because the execution is? Should a step-back be reversible, a pause with criteria for return, or should it be final so the released capacity can be redeployed with confidence? When a popular commitment is ended, how should the decision be explained so that the people who built it are not punished for the attempt? A good adviser has a view on each, grounded in evidence, and offers it before the decision rather than after.

The seat is advisory, and the chief executive decides. The Advisory Chair helps leadership agree where to compete and which limits stay with market leaders, counsels on the measures that should steer investment, capacity and control, and recommends whether each inherited commitment is kept, paused or closed. They challenge any proposal that would leave its cost or risk with nobody to answer for it, and investment cases that omit uptake, dependencies or what could go wrong. They advise on how the leadership team is arranged and how problems rise, help the chief executive and operating leaders work through conflicts, and help decide how often progress and unsettled questions are reviewed.

Twelve months from criteria to a reshaped model

Within ninety days the chief executive should have, and have agreed, the adviser's recommended criteria for where the business competes and where it steps back. Around month nine every market and offering should have been assessed against those criteria, with step-back decisions taken and the controls that govern them in place. By month 12 the operating model and its controls should have been reshaped around the chosen markets and reviewed with the Board Chair.

Someone who has ended something popular

You will have worked in or alongside the leadership of a business turning over $970 million or more and employing 6,300 or more across two countries, with experience of value creation, platform pivot and professionalisation. Choosing where to compete is strategy formation in its purest form, sought at level 4; level 3 in P&L ownership, in judgement of risk and in operating cadence keeps the advice grounded in how the business actually runs.

You can name a well-liked commitment you brought to an end, show the evidence that justified it, and say what that freed up. During a value-creation programme you have moved authority, redirected funding and reset how the business ran week to week, and you have put a disputed downside to a chief executive without softening it. And you are willing to be judged at the end of the year on whether your advice was right, not merely on whether it was heard.

Who tests the judgement, and when

There are four stages. The Group Chief Executive Officer has the first, a private video call in week 1 about the brief. The Board Chair has the second, in week 3, working with you on how compete-or-step-back criteria should be framed. The third, in week 5, is an in-person meeting with executives who run the main functions, some of whom lead the offerings in question. The full board of directors has the fourth, in week 7. Each stage brings our feedback in writing within two working days.