Interim Country Managing Director — Value Agenda (Technology)

Cash now or capacity later

Every country business lives with the same tension between cash it can release this year and the capacity it will need to compete in three. Cutting too deep buys a strong quarter and a weak position; protecting everything preserves options the business cannot afford. The interim managing director will resolve that trade-off with executive authority delegated by the Board of Directors.

What the board has delegated

First, you will settle who decides what in the country, with clear limits on what local leaders still decide, and choose the evidence a funding, capacity or control decision must rest on. Each commitment then continues, waits or closes on your ruling, and proposals that push cost or risk onto others while no one is accountable are stopped. Investment that assumes adoption, skips over its dependencies or leaves the downside unexamined will be declined. You will fix who leads and how matters escalate, and work through disagreements between the directors and the people running the country business before budgets or staff are locked in.

How the trade-off is made well

It starts with rules agreed in advance rather than judgements improvised under pressure. A good country leader decides what counts as strategic capacity, protects it explicitly, and treats everything else as a candidate for cash. In a listed technology business that includes being honest about which integrations, partnerships and release commitments genuinely build the future and which simply defer a cost. It also means bringing a disputed downside to the board without softening it, because a trade-off the board cannot see is one it cannot own.

Three checkpoints across eighteen months

The board and the managing director should use the first ninety days to agree how country decisions are allocated and the rules for balancing near-term cash with strategic capacity. At month nine, country commitments should have been ruled on under those rules, with investment lacking an adoption or downside case declined. By month 18 country leadership and escalation should be settled, and the board should be reviewing cash and capacity choices on a steady cycle.

A turnaround leader with succession in mind

You have carried a turnaround whose effects reached directors and frontline teams alike, in businesses of at least $710 million in revenue and 1,300 people across six or more countries. Turnaround and succession experience are examined, succession with particular care, since a country business balanced on one leader's judgement is not balanced at all. Strategy formation is expected at level 4; at level 3 we look for an operating cadence you can run, sound judgement of risk and ownership of a P&L. You keep the controls that pay their way, put a price on every exception, and hand over a country team deeper than the one you found. Uncertainty, in your hands, is something to report and manage rather than a reason to defer, and a country head's objection does not keep a failing commitment alive.

The selection, briefly

The Board of Directors holds a first conversation with you, in confidence and by video, during week one. In the second week the Regional President sets you a working case, and in the third the investment committee discusses it with you in person. We put our reading of each stage in writing and send it within two working days.