Interim Regional Strategy Director — Portfolio Delivery

The judgement calls ahead

Portfolio choices that are deferred tend to resurface every planning cycle in slightly different clothes. The Interim Regional Strategy Director holds executive authority under the Group Chief Executive Officer and is there to settle them and then to make the settlement hold. Four kinds of judgement will recur.

The first is deciding, initiative by initiative, what stays in the portfolio and what leaves. Every inherited commitment will need a verdict, and you will need to reach it with evidence a sceptical operating leader would accept. That means deciding, early, which measures will govern where money and people go across the four markets.

The second is protecting the settled choices from drift. New proposals will arrive that look reasonable on their own and quietly undo a decision already taken. You can stop a proposal that slides its burden onto a party that never consented, and decline investment that has not named its users, its dependencies or the cost of failure.

The third is the boundary of local authority. You will set the regional thresholds left with local leadership and separate a necessary exception from one sustained by habit, and write the reasoning down so that the next person to ask for an exception can see why the line is where it is.

The fourth is about people. You approve how the leadership is structured and how contested decisions rise, and when operating leaders disagree with you, you resolve it before money and people are committed.

Eighteen months from settlement to delivery

The first ninety days are for settling: agreeing the portfolio with the Group Chief Executive Officer, giving each retained initiative an accountable leader, a delivery path and criteria for stopping it. By around month nine delivery should be tracked against the settled portfolio, any drift from the agreed choices challenged openly, and portfolio exceptions closed by the people who own them. By month 18 the portfolio should be delivered through a stable regional cadence, with value evidenced and every new proposal tested against the choices already made.

A strategist who stays for the unglamorous part

You have made strategy choices in technology or digital platforms where waiting had a price you could count. The businesses were of a certain size: $245 million or more in revenue, at least 400 people, four or more countries. The board weighs ESG transition, integration and turnaround; an ESG transition is a useful test because it requires holding a long-range commitment against short-term pressure. Strategy formation at level 4 matters most; beneath it, PMO governance, change adoption and the building of value cases are each wanted at level 3. Your accountability continues after the board decides, down to the dull work of closing exceptions one by one.

Three weeks from first call to executive committee

The process is over in three weeks. You speak first with the Group Chief Executive Officer, privately and by video, during week one. Week two is a working case set by the Audit Committee Chair: a contested portfolio choice to settle on paper. Week three is an in-person discussion with the executive committee about how the settled portfolio would be delivered. Our response follows each stage in writing within 2 working days.