Interim Chief Business Officer — Integration

Sound local plans are not yet a strategy

A collection of sound local plans does not add up to a strategy. Each one is written by people who know their market, each makes reasonable assumptions, and each competes quietly with the others for the same capital, the same central services and the same senior attention. Overlaps go unnoticed; gaps go unowned. The Interim Chief Business Officer is appointed to turn that collection into one operating agenda for which someone is accountable at every level, and holds executive authority, under the Investment Committee, to do it.

The method matters. Integration of this kind fails when the centre simply overrides the markets, and fails differently when it merely staples their plans together. The officer will build a single way of making decisions out of the local plans while keeping clear thresholds within which local leaders act on their own judgement. They will decide what evidence every market must bring when it asks for spending, capacity or a change to controls, so that every plan is argued on the same terms. They will rule on which inherited commitments carry on and which do not, stop any proposal that pushes cost or risk sideways onto another market or function without its agreement, and decline investment cases that have not reckoned with whether the change will be used, what it depends on and what failure would cost. They will approve the leadership structure, arbitrate between the Investment Committee and market leaders when their priorities collide, and fix the cadence of the board's reviews of progress, open decisions and exceptions.

The person for this has been in charge where revenue was $580 million or more, people numbered 1,500 and the business crossed four countries, and brings experience of cost transformation, professionalisation and regulatory remediation. Each prepares you for a different part of the job: cost transformation for the arguments about shared resources, professionalisation for building routines that survive you, remediation for working under scrutiny where every decision must be evidenced. Strategy formation is the level 4 requirement; below it, operating cadence, P&L responsibility and risk judgement are needed at level 3. Your baselines have been attacked by an investment committee and by the market leaders who know the customer best, and still stood. You keep the controls that earn their place, put a price on every exception so it can be seen, and hand over a deeper operating team than you inherited.

Two years of consolidation

Over the first ninety days the local plans should be brought into a single framework for decisions, with a responsible leader for each part and the local thresholds agreed with the Investment Committee. Around month nine one operating agenda should be in use, and commitments that overlapped or that nobody owned should already be on hold or closed. By month 24 the integrated agenda should govern capital and capacity across markets, with successors accountable for each part of it.

Answerable for two years

The officer answers for the full 24 months and can end a commitment before all the country heads have come round. The selection process reflects that. The Investment Committee opens it in week one, in confidence and over video. The Audit Committee Chair follows in week three, concentrating on the controls an integrated agenda must keep. Week five brings a face-to-face panel of executives, each speaking for a different function, and the full board takes the final stage in the seventh week. Our response in writing comes within three working days of each stage.