Interim Chief Transformation Officer — Recovery

A transformation officer who counts only what the plant can prove

Transformation programmes generate two kinds of number. One is the benefit recorded in the programme tracker; the other is the change that shows up in throughput, unit cost or working capital when someone goes and looks. A good Chief Transformation Officer in manufacturing treats the distance between those two as the most important figure on the page. That is the heart of this interim appointment: to lead the programme so that what is reported and what is real are the same thing, and to do it with an executive's authority rather than a consultant's reach.

The authority is substantial. Reporting to the Regional President, you will write the rules for transformation decisions, including the spending and scope limits below which site managers act alone. You will define what a claim must demonstrate before it releases money, capacity or control changes, including the test a benefit must pass before the tracker may count it. Every programme commitment continues or ends on your decision. Proposals that slide cost or risk onto a site that never agreed to absorb it go back to their authors, and so does any investment case that is silent on whether people will genuinely work differently, which other programmes it leans on, or what a failure would cost. You will approve how the leadership team is built and how unresolved issues climb, and you will settle disagreements between the Regional President and the leaders running operations while the money is still uncommitted.

What makes the seat hard is the judgement underneath those powers. In any manufacturer spread across borders, some local variation is necessary and some is simply habit that has acquired defenders, and the officer has to tell them apart and write the difference down. The people closest to plants, engineering and supply know the work better than any programme office, so a baseline is only worth having if it survives their challenge as well as the Regional President's. And sometimes the most valuable thing you can do is end a commitment people like, show the evidence behind that choice, and point to the capacity it releases.

The Regional President is looking for someone who has done this in a business with revenue of $875 million or more and 2,300 or more people, active in at least three countries. Experience of scale-up, integration and professionalisation will carry weight, because each forces a business to replace informal ways of working with ones that can be checked. The capability bar is level 4 in strategy formation and level 3 in each of PMO governance, value cases and change adoption.

Benefits that survive inspection by month 12

The first ninety days establish the ground rules: an agreed benefit baseline, clarity on which decisions sit where, and a person accountable for every open transformation commitment. Around month nine, the benefits the programme reports should have been confirmed against the agreed evidence, and commitments that never had a credible view of take-up or downside should have been paused or stopped. At month 12 the programme should be in a state another leader can run from the first morning: benefits that stand up to inspection, a route for raising problems that has been tested under pressure, and a team that no longer depends on the interim.

Before you put yourself forward, and how the process runs

Candidates who would hold a stop decision until every national head consents, or who want a voice in the programme but not ownership of its result across all 12 months, should look elsewhere. Those who stay in the running start with the Regional President, by video and in confidence, in the first week. You meet again in the third week, this time to test a reported benefit together. In week five the process moves into the room, before a panel of executives who each lead a different function, and in week seven the board's directors meet you together. We write to you within five working days after each of the four.