Interim Chief Operating Officer — Integration (Agribusiness and Food)

An operator who can retire practices people are proud of

Integration exposes a particular kind of operator. Plenty of executives can add practices; far fewer can end ones that colleagues are proud of, on evidence, and make the decision stick. The Interim Chief Operating Officer needs to be the second kind. The operations you have run were no smaller than $600 million in revenue and 2,100 people, across two countries, and you have run them in conditions that tested you: regulatory remediation, where the operating evidence and the account given to the board had to match exactly; a joint venture, where operating standards were shared with a partner; and a turnaround, where the pace of decisions separated recovery from drift.

The capability bar is operating cadence at level 4, meaning you can design and run the weekly, monthly and quarterly rhythm by which an operation knows how it is doing. Alongside it sit operating model, network footprint, and quality and safety, each at level 3. In food and agribusiness, quality and safety are never a separate workstream during integration; every change to a process is also a change to a control.

Decisions that rest with this COO

Answering to the Regional President, you will hold executive authority over the operating side of the integration. You will set out who decides what in operations, including the thresholds local leaders retain, and decide which measures count when investment, capacity and controls are weighed across the countries in scope. You will decide which inherited operating commitments go forward, are held or are stopped. Proposals that offload cost or risk onto others with no accountable executive stop with you, and so does investment that ignores take-up, dependencies or what failure would cost. The leadership structure and the routes issues travel upward need your sign-off, and conflicts between the Regional President and operating leaders are yours to resolve before capital is committed.

Twenty-four months from choice to closure

As the first ninety days close, there should be an agreed set of operating decision rights and a shared view of which practices will scale across the group and which will be retired. Around month nine integration of the retained practices should be well under way, every exception should sit with someone accountable, and conflicts should be settled before money moves. By month 24 a single integrated operating model, leadership structure and escalation route should be running, and the retired practices should be fully closed rather than left running quietly in parallel.

From the Regional President to the full board

Selection opens in week one with a first conversation, in confidence and by video, with the Regional President. The Audit Committee Chair follows in the third week, in a working session about how you keep controls intact while processes change underneath them. In the fifth week executive leaders from each of the functions question you in person; the process ends in week seven before the full board of directors. You will know how each stage went, in writing, within three working days.