Advisory Director — Value Creation and Integration

Counsel for a committee that has to choose

Portfolio decisions in industrial manufacturing rarely fail for lack of analysis. They fail because each business arrives with a case that is coherent on its own terms and unaffordable alongside the others, and because integration value is promised long before anyone has worked out who must change how they work to deliver it. The Advisory Director sits beside the Investment Committee as the person who reads those cases the way an operator would. The committee keeps the decisions. Your contribution is to make sure that, when it decides, it is choosing between options that have been honestly compared.

In practice that means helping the committee agree where its own thresholds sit and which calls properly belong with the leaders running plants and businesses. It means advising on the evidence that should stand behind any request for capital or capacity, and recommending, commitment by commitment, which should carry on, which should wait and which should stop.

Where an adviser's voice should change the outcome

The moments that matter are the ones just before money moves. A proposal that shifts cost onto another business, or parks risk with nobody in particular, should not reach a vote without someone pointing that out. An integration case that counts synergies but says nothing about the people who must adopt new ways of working, the other programmes it leans on, or what happens if its assumptions break, deserves the same treatment. You will also advise on how leadership is organised and on how unresolved issues should rise, so that disagreements between the committee and the people running the businesses are settled while there is still money left to steer, not argued over afterwards.

Month three, month nine, month 24

Over the first ninety days, the committee should agree how its portfolio choices get settled: which thresholds stay local, and what standard a value case must meet before it is heard. Around month nine, every live portfolio commitment should have received a clear recommendation from you, and the integration cases among them should have been tested for whether the organisation will genuinely take up what they assume. By month 24 the portfolio choices should be settled and owned by the executives who will live with them, integration value should be measurable against the original cases, and difficult questions should be reaching the committee without needing you to carry them there.

An operator's eye on investment cases

Somewhere in your past is a business of $660 million or more in revenue, employing 1,900 people or more across no fewer than eight countries, where a deferred decision had a real cost. The committee will look carefully at your experience of ESG transition, joint ventures and carve-outs, three situations in which the story told to a board and the evidence coming out of operations most easily drift apart. It will also test strategy formation at level 4, and expects level 3 in PMO governance, in building value cases and in leading change adoption.

The strongest candidates can describe a disputed downside they put in front of an investment committee without diluting it, and can explain what remained unknown without letting the unknown become a reason to wait. Expect to stay with the consequences, too: advice that ends at the vote is of limited use to a committee settling choices over two years. Anyone who would hold back a halt until each national head had signed off will find this seat frustrating.

Committee, president, executives, board

In week one the Investment Committee itself talks with you confidentially over video, asking how you would handle a portfolio decision that refuses to settle. Week three takes you to the Regional President for a hands-on session, which is where your advice meets operating reality. Week five is spent in the room with a panel of executives representing each function of the business, and in week seven the board's directors complete the sequence. Each stage is answered in writing within five working days.