Interim Senior Vice President, Enterprise Transformation — Controls

An operator who has lived on both sides of a deal

Somewhere in your career you have been the person who inherited an acquisition thesis and had to make it true on the shop floor. You changed who could approve what, where money went and how often leaders met to account for it, and you did all of that while the plants kept shipping. Your experience of M&A buy-side work, cost transformation and turnaround should show that sequence clearly, and it should come from a business no smaller than $370 million in revenue, with 1,000 people or more working in four countries or more.

The Regional President will want to see how you think as much as what you have done. Strategy formation sits at level 4 for this seat; the level-3 expectations cover PMO governance, value cases and change adoption. In practice that means you can build an integration case that survives its own assumptions, get people to work differently rather than merely sign up, and run a programme office that reports truth rather than colour. Before letting an exception continue, you have established who pays for it. When a gap is still open, you can say so to your reporting line without hiding it or treating it as a reason to wait. Successors grow under you while the operating model is being rebuilt, so the improvements outlast your personal involvement.

The calls that will be yours

An interim with executive authority is measured by decisions, not recommendations. You will set the rules for transformation decisions, including which thresholds are retained locally. Which proof counts when money, plant capacity and controls are allocated across countries will be your call. Each commitment either goes forward or stops on your word, and any proposal that quietly loads cost or risk onto a business unit that never signed up for it ends with you. Investment cases that are vague about which teams will actually work differently, which other programmes they lean on, or how bad a failure could get, you will decline. You will sign off the leadership line-up for the transformation and the way unresolved matters travel upward, arbitrate when the Regional President and plant leadership disagree, and fix the rhythm by which directors are shown progress, exceptions and decisions still open.

From thesis to one control framework

The first ninety days are about tying the deal's assumptions to an operating baseline anyone can check, and agreeing where local thresholds sit and who answers for each exception. Around month nine, every integration commitment should have been sorted into kept, deferred or stopped, with a reporting rhythm to the board that shows progress and exceptions side by side rather than in separate packs. By month 18 the deal thesis, the integration work and the continuity of operations should be governed through a single control framework, run by successors you have developed and able to hold without you in the room.

A selection that takes under a month

The pace is quick. Week one is a private video call with the Regional President, covering the remit and where you would start. Seven days later, in week two, the two of you work through a case side by side. In the third week you sit down in person with the executive committee. After every stage you can expect our response in writing inside three working days.