Interim Chief Executive Officer — Controls (Education)

A stack of plans, and one executive to merge them

Education businesses tend to accumulate plans. Each campus, programme portfolio and country develops its own, each with sensible logic, and over time the organisation finds itself steering by the sum of them. The Interim Chief Executive Officer is appointed to replace that with one accountable operating agenda, and is given the executive authority to do it while learners keep learning and faculty keep teaching. Reporting to the Investment Committee, you will decide where authority sits across campuses and programmes, and name the limits local leadership keeps. You will settle which enrolment, quality and cost figures decide investment, capacity and control across countries, and determine which inherited commitments go forward, which wait and which end. You can stop any campus or programme plan that loads its cost or risk onto a party without its consent, and refuse investment where the case does not name its adopters among faculty and learners, its dependencies or its downside. You approve the leadership structure, set how issues reach the committee, and broker agreement between the committee and the heads of campuses and programmes before money is committed.

The hardest part of a single agenda in education is that it runs on an academic calendar. Changes to programmes, timetables or support services land at intake and assessment points, and a decision missed in one window may wait a year for the next. A credible operating agenda is built around those fixed points rather than in spite of them. An early success in the seat may be a commitment stopped, not an initiative started, and you should be ready to defend that with evidence.

The 24-month arc

Across the first ninety days, a single operating agenda should be drafted from the existing plans and put to the Investment Committee, with decision rights, controls and accountable executives agreed. Around month nine the competing plans should have been folded into that agenda, and inherited commitments should have been taken forward, held or ended on stated evidence rather than by attrition. By month 24 the organisation should be running on one accountable operating agenda, with its controls tested in use and a leadership team able to lead without an interim at the top.

A chief executive tested in scale-up

During a scale-up you have reset decision rights, budgets and operating rhythm, in an organisation with revenue of $835 million or more, 5,300 people and three countries under its roof. You have handed over authority inside a learning, faculty and student-services system that had to keep teaching through the handover. Scale-up, platform pivot and joint venture are where the Investment Committee will press hardest, together with strategy formation at level 4; level 3 is expected in P&L ownership, in operating cadence and in risk judgement. You can set an open gap before a committee and still move the decision on before the next intake. A plan can be stopped without a consensus among the countries, and the outcome is yours to own for the full 24 months.

Seven weeks from first call to the board

You begin with the Investment Committee, privately and on video, as the first week gets under way, talking through how you would turn many plans into one. In the third week the Risk Committee Chair takes you through a working session. Week five puts you in person before the executives who lead each function, sitting as a panel, and the full board has the last conversation in the seventh week. No step waits more than four working days for our answer in writing.