Interim Chief Business Officer — Value Agenda

Not a commercial director with a bigger title

People hearing the title often picture a senior salesperson or a strategy lead on loan. Neither describes this appointment. The officer reports to the Board of Directors and holds real executive authority for 24 months over how the business decides, funds and staffs its value agenda. Nor is it a mandate to build a personal empire. The point is a leadership structure that works for the next phase of ownership and does not need the interim officer to hold it together.

Where the authority gets used

The first use of authority is clarity. You will set out who decides what across the business, including the limits within which each local leader may act, and make the evidence for allocating investment and operating capacity explicit enough to argue with. From there the work becomes selective. Each inherited commitment gets your verdict to continue, pause or stop, and you will turn down proposals that relocate cost or exposure while leaving nobody accountable. You will hold back money from value cases that skip how the change will be taken up, what it depends on, or how bad things could get. You will decide how the leadership team is organised and how problems travel to the board, and run a board rhythm in which progress, exceptions and unresolved decisions surface without anyone having to ask.

In a subsidiary, much of this is negotiated across two layers of governance. The officers who do well in these seats make the local board's choices legible to the wider group without asking permission for each one.

A record of building what you will later step away from

The business you have led will have brought in at least $375 million a year and employed 1,000 or more people across two countries. The board will look for geographic expansion in which the consequences reached both the boardroom and the front line, for buy-side M&A in which you had to make an acquired business fit a value agenda, and for succession that you designed deliberately. Strategy formation is asked for at level 4; the three supporting capabilities, risk judgement, a steady operating cadence and ownership of a P&L, at level 3. The strongest candidates will be able to show a moment where evidence changed who received capital, people or management attention, and will talk as readily about the successors they developed as about the results they delivered.

Month by month, then week by week

After the first ninety days, the business should have an agreed account of decision rights, and a funding rule that no value case reaches approval without dealing with take-up, dependencies and downside. By the ninth month the directors should have signed off the leadership structure for the next ownership phase, with a named successor for each critical business role. By month 24 the value agenda should run on a steady board rhythm, and its results should no longer depend on the interim officer stepping in.

Selection itself runs over seven weeks. It opens in the first week, when the Board of Directors talks with you confidentially over video. The third week is reserved for the Board Chair, in an extended session of real work together. During the fifth week executive leaders representing each function question you in person; the directors then meet as a board in week seven to decide. Feedback on each stage comes in writing, never more than two working days after it.