Advisory Chair — Operating Model and Renewal

An adviser who has chosen between this year and the next five

The Advisory Chair we want has sat in a room where cash was needed now and the investment that would matter in five years was competing for the same money. You have made general management decisions in media and entertainment in businesses that reached $350 million in revenue and 800 people or more, across six or more countries, and you have stopped at least one unsupported commitment before it did damage. You have refused funding when a case was silent on who would adopt the change and what could go wrong, and you have then helped rebuild the capability the refusal left missing. Digital transformation, succession and professionalisation are the experiences we will explore with you.

Strategy formation counts most, at level 4; P&L ownership, setting an operating cadence and risk judgement are each wanted at level 3. Your judgement should have been tested somewhere content, audience and distribution work could not pause while decision rights were being changed.

What the committee will ask of its adviser

The Advisory Chair counsels the Investment Committee, and reports to it, for 12 months. The committee decides; the adviser shapes how it decides. That means helping it agree which decisions stay with local leadership, advising on the evidence it uses to judge investment, operating capacity and controls, and recommending which commitments should go on and which should be held back or ended. The adviser questions proposals that slide cost or risk onto people who have not accepted it and investment cases that ignore uptake, what else they lean on or what they could lose, gives a view on how leadership is arranged and how problems rise, and helps the committee and operating leaders resolve conflicts.

In media, the cash-versus-capacity question has its own texture, because content spend is front-loaded and its returns are uncertain. An adviser who can help a committee value strategic capacity honestly, rather than defaulting to whatever protects this quarter's cash, will earn their place. So will one who can tell when protecting cash is in fact the strategic choice.

Twelve months of better trade-offs

The committee's first task, across the first ninety days, is to agree how near-term cash and long-term strategic capacity will be weighed in each decision it takes, so that the trade-off is made openly rather than by default. Around month nine, it should have reviewed operating model options and tested inherited commitments against both cash and capacity. By month 12, it should be overseeing renewal through an agreed operating model and a set rhythm for taking cash and capacity trade-offs.

Committee first, then the operators

The Investment Committee meets you first, confidentially and over video, in the opening week. In week three you sit down with the Regional President, and your advice meets operating reality. Senior executives drawn from every function meet you as a panel, face to face, in the fifth week; the seventh week ends with the full board. Expect our response in writing no more than five working days after each.