Advisory Director — Network Performance and Controls

Advice for a committee that has chosen reliability first

An Advisory Director has no line authority and no vote. What the appointment does carry is the ear of the Board Operations Committee, to which it reports, for 18 months, on a choice the committee has made: that reliability of the operation comes before more volume. Holding to that kind of choice is harder than making it. Every quarter brings an attractive opportunity to add throughput, and every one arrives with a plausible argument that the system can absorb it. The adviser's value is to help the committee tell the difference between capacity that genuinely exists and capacity that exists only in a spreadsheet.

Much of the counsel will be structural. You will help the committee agree how operating decisions are divided, including what local leaders may decide on their own, and advise on the evidence it should use when it governs investment, capacity and controls. You will recommend which inherited commitments should proceed, wait until reliability is proven, or be stopped. You will challenge proposals that load cost or risk onto others with nobody answerable for it, and investment cases that are silent on the asset's users, its dependencies or how bad the downside could be. And your counsel will cover how the leadership is organised, how problems are escalated, and how often the committee sees progress, exceptions and pending decisions.

Good advisers to operations committees tend to share a habit: they ask to see the measure before they hear the story. Reliability in food and agribusiness operations is measurable, through service levels, schedule adherence, quality holds and the like, and a committee that agrees its measures early can take volume decisions with far less argument.

Eighteen months of reliability before ambition

Within the first ninety days the committee should have agreed how operating decisions are divided, and a set of reliability measures that any further volume commitment must satisfy first. Around month nine it should have reviewed its volume commitments and paused those the reliability evidence does not yet support. By month 18 the controls, escalation routes and reporting rhythm should have been tested in use, and should hold without the adviser in the room.

The operator behind the advice

Your operations leadership should have spanned at least $890 million of revenue and 2,900 people, working across two countries. The committee will look for experience of succession, buy-side M&A and turnaround, and in particular for a time when authority, funding and operating rhythm all moved while leadership was changing. The capability profile is operating cadence at level 4, with operating model, network footprint, and quality and safety at level 3. You will be expected to show a time you insisted on knowing who bore the cost of an exception before letting it stand, and how you developed successors so that results did not depend on you.

Selection takes three weeks. The Board Operations Committee holds a confidential exchange over video with you in the first week; the second week brings a working case with the Board Chair; and the third is an in-person discussion with the directors. A response in writing follows each stage within two working days.