Advisory Director — Value Creation (Consumer and Retail)

Calls an adviser will be asked to make

Portfolio choices that are deferred once tend to be deferred again, because every postponement looks prudent on the day it is made. The Advisory Director's value lies in helping the Board Strategy Committee reach conclusions it can stand behind. The authority is counsel rather than command: you advise, and the committee decides. The judgement calls arrive in recognisable forms. Which inherited commitments still deserve their funding, and which should be wound down? Where should the limits sit, so that country and category leaders decide what they are best placed to decide while the committee keeps the choices that bind the whole business? What evidence should decide where investment, people and control effort are spent? And when a value case arrives without naming its adopters, the things it leans on or what a bad season would do to it, will you say so before the money moves?

You will also be asked to challenge any plan that quietly moves a cost or exposure from one category or country to another without the receiving side saying yes, to counsel the committee on how its leadership is organised and how stuck issues climb to it, and to help the committee and its trading leaders settle disagreements before they harden into positions. Part of the work is shaping the rhythm itself: how progress, exceptions and open decisions come to the committee, in what form and how often.

In consumer and retail, many of these calls are governed by the trading calendar: a choice not made before a season is planned usually waits a full year. An adviser who reads the commercial plan alongside the cash it actually produces, and who knows when a decision has to land, will be useful from the first meeting.

Eighteen months of settled choices

Over the first ninety days, each major portfolio choice should be framed in front of the committee, with the evidence that will decide it and the limits left to local leaders agreed. Around month nine your advice should have reached every inherited commitment, and no value case should have gone forward for funding without first being tested for adoption, for the things it depends on and for its downside. By month 18 the portfolio choices should be settled rather than postponed, and the committee's cadence for progress and open decisions should be running without your direct involvement.

An adviser with an operator's scars

You have carried executive or board-level responsibility in consumer, retail or distribution, in a business of no less than $290 million in revenue with 800 people working in six countries. You have carried a contested downside before a strategy committee with its consequence intact, and you have withheld money from a case that left adoption and downside blank, then helped rebuild the capability to do the work properly. The committee will weigh what you have done in culture reset, professionalisation and turnaround, and wants strategy formation at level 4, with PMO governance, change adoption and the value case each held at level 3. Counsel only lands when the adviser stays with it, so the role needs someone who will answer for their advice across the full 18 months and who is comfortable recommending a stop before every market has come round to it.

Advice heard three ways

The process is deliberately brisk. The Board Strategy Committee opens it in week 1 with a private video call about how you would frame the choices it has yet to make. In week 2 you and the Regional President work through a live case together, which shows how your advice sounds to someone who must carry it out. In week 3 the investment committee meets you in person. Each stage is answered in writing within two working days.