Board Chair — Governance Renewal (Technology)

Neither a figurehead nor a shadow chief executive

A chair charged with renewal can fail in two opposite directions. One is ceremonial: chairing meetings gracefully, keeping the peace and leaving the board's composition to drift. The other is executive: running the company from the chair because management feels slow. Neither is wanted. This is an oversight role. Its authority lies in asking the right questions, insisting on the right evidence and shaping the board itself, not in directing operations. The appointment is accountable to the shareholders, and every lever it holds is exercised through the board rather than around it.

Renewing a board while it keeps governing

Succession is the centre of the work, and a listed board cannot pause its oversight while it renews itself. The chair therefore runs two agendas at once: today's scrutiny and tomorrow's composition.

On the first, you will lead directors in agreeing which decisions the board keeps for itself and which sit with management, and in deciding what information the board needs before it signs off spending, resourcing or a change to internal controls. You will see that inherited commitments, sequencing choices and local exceptions are questioned whenever they leave a burden with a party that never took it on, and that an investment case is asked, before approval, who will actually use the result, what else must go right, and how bad the bad case is. How the senior team is organised falls under your oversight, and when directors and management disagree you help them close the argument rather than carry it from meeting to meeting.

On the second, you will treat succession as a question about the work the board must do in the years ahead, not about who is next in line. That means an honest skills view of the board, committee mandates rewritten where they have drifted, and candidates assessed against what the portfolio now requires.

The chair this board needs

The business you chaired, or served in a senior board role, was in technology or digital platforms and of real size: revenue of $725 million or more, 1,200 people or more, and operations spanning three countries. Cost transformation, platform pivots and professionalisation are the experiences weighed, because each tests whether a board can change its own habits while the business changes beneath it. Governance ethics at level 4 is the decisive capability: the willingness to put an uncomfortable succession question on the agenda yourself. Alongside it, the board expects level 3 in entity governance, in risk judgement and in handling the board and its stakeholders.

You should be able to describe a commitment you challenged until it was withdrawn, and how the board rebuilt around the gap. A chair who waits for consensus before raising a hard question about the board's own membership will find the year slipping away.

Twelve months, and how we will get to know you

Inside the first ninety days, directors should have reviewed the board's agenda and committee mandates and agreed a succession timetable every director can see. Around month nine a board evaluation should be complete, its findings tested rather than filed, and committee composition and succession candidates reviewed against the renewal plan. By month 12 succession decisions should be taken, renewed mandates in force and the next evaluation cycle scheduled with someone answerable for it.

The route to appointment mirrors that arc. It opens in the first week, when the Nomination and Governance Committee Chair speaks with you confidentially by video about your view of renewal. Two weeks on, in week three, you sit down with the Regional President to examine where board oversight meets the operating business. The fifth week is an in-person meeting with executives who each lead one of the company's functions, and week seven closes the process with all the directors around one table. Expect our response in writing no later than 5 working days after each meeting.