Advisory Chair — Operating Model and Value Agenda

A former operator the board can borrow judgement from

The person the Board Chair is looking for has run large businesses and has watched operating models fail, usually not in the design but in the first year after a leader leaves or a market turns, when decisions that were clear on paper drift back to whoever pushes hardest. You have seen a culture reset through, with effects that ran from the boardroom to the people serving clients. Your baselines have held when a board chair and the people running the work pressed on them. And you have withheld funding from cases that could name neither their users nor their downside, then helped rebuild the management capability that the refusal exposed.

You have worked in organisations of $760 million in revenue, 3,200 people and six countries, or bigger. The Board Chair will weigh your record in culture reset, platform pivots and integration, each a moment when decision rights are redrawn under pressure. Strategy formation is wanted at level 4, and at level 3 risk judgement, operating cadence and ownership of a P&L. You can describe a gap that remains open and still give a clear recommendation.

Counsel on who decides what

The appointment is advisory. You will not hold executive authority, and you will not sit as a director. Your influence comes from the quality of your counsel to the Board Chair and the board over 24 months.

Decision rights in a professional services business are unusually contested. Practice leaders and client partners often hold real economic power, and an operating model that ignores that will be routed around, while one that defers to it entirely will not scale. You will help the board agree how decisions are allocated, including what local leaders may still approve themselves, and advise on what evidence should steer spending, capacity and controls. You will advise on which commitments deserve to continue, challenge any proposal that slips cost or risk to others without an owner and investment cases that leave out adoption, dependencies or the downside, and give your view on who should lead and how issues climb. When the Board Chair and the firm's operators disagree, you will help them settle it before resources are committed. You would recommend stopping a commitment without first polling every country leader, and you expect to stay answerable for your advice across the full term.

Decision rights that survive a test

By day ninety, a proposed set of decision rights, including the thresholds kept by local leadership, should be agreed with the Board Chair. By month nine, those rights should have been stress-tested against plausible market and leadership change scenarios, and the amendments you advised should have been adopted or consciously set aside by the board. By month 24, a board review with the Board Chair should be able to confirm that the operating model's decision rights have held through change, not merely through calm.

Meeting the Board Chair and the operators

The Board Chair opens in week one with a confidential conversation by video. In week three the Regional President will test how your thinking lands with someone running a business day to day. Week five takes you, in person, before executive leaders from each function, and week 7 before the full board. Our response to each stage will be sent in writing within five working days.