Advisory Director, Capital and Performance — Value Agenda

A planning cycle that runs on agreed measures

This advisory appointment spans one full planning cycle with time either side: twelve months. During the first ninety days, and with your help, the audit committee should agree the cash and performance measures it will carry into the next planning round, defined tightly enough that business units cannot reinterpret them. Around month nine the committee should have reviewed the commitments it inherited against those measures, and pushed back on any that lack an identified economic owner. By month 12 the planning cycle itself should have run on that discipline, with the escalation arrangements proven in use rather than on paper.

Influence without a vote

The Advisory Director reports to the Audit Committee Chair and has no executive authority; influence comes entirely from the quality of the counsel. You will help the committee settle how decisions are divided and where local leaders' authority stops. You will advise on what proof the committee should demand on investment, capacity and controls, and recommend which inherited commitments should go on, pause or end. You will question proposals that shift cost or risk with nobody answerable for it, and investment cases that skip take-up, dependencies or downside. Your counsel will extend to how leadership is organised and how issues escalate, and you will help the committee and the operators settle disagreements before resources are committed.

Advisers to audit committees on capital and performance are most useful when they translate. Committees are usually fluent in controls and assurance and often less fluent in why a business unit's cash conversion behaves as it does. An adviser who can explain the operating mechanics behind a number, and propose the measure that would have exposed it earlier, gives the committee something it cannot easily get from management.

An adviser who has cut cost and kept capability

Your finance career should include an organisation with revenue of at least $600 million and 1,000 or more people across six countries. Cost transformation is the experience the committee values most, particularly one felt as sharply by front-line teams as in the boardroom; platform pivot and professionalisation are the others. The capability profile is capital allocation at level 4; at level 3, the committee wants FP&A forecasting, controls and reporting, plus sound risk judgement. You should be able to show a time you established who truly paid for an exception before allowing it to continue, and be comfortable that your first success here might be halting a commitment rather than starting something new.

Testing the counsel before it is retained

Selection opens in week one with the Audit Committee Chair, privately over video. The Board Chair spends the third week's working session with you, where your counsel meets a chair's scepticism at close quarters. An in-person panel of executive leaders from each function follows in the fifth week, before the full board of directors closes the process in week seven. An answer in writing follows each stage within two working days.