Advisory Chair — Operating Model and Integration

An adviser on who owns the decisions after an integration

Integrations change more than systems and reporting lines. They unsettle who believes they own a decision, and for a while several people may each be sure it is theirs. The adviser's work is to help the board settle those questions deliberately rather than by attrition.

Advice within a clear remit

The Advisory Chair offers counsel; the board decides. Within that remit you will help the board agree who decides what, and how much each local leader may approve alone, and advise on the evidence it should insist on before it commits funding, capacity or control. You will advise on which commitments should carry on and which should pause or stop. You will challenge any plan that lets cost or risk fall to someone who never accepted it, and investment cases that leave uptake, what they depend on or the downside unexplained. Your counsel will also cover who leads after the integration, how problems are raised, and how often the board looks at progress, exceptions and calls still pending.

Good advice here does not settle today's disagreement and stop there. It gives the board a way of deciding that will still work when the people change, and a record of why each call was made. An adviser who has lived through integration knows that the questions of ownership which feel settled in the first month are often the ones that reopen in the sixth, and builds the board's process so that reopening them is orderly rather than political.

Twelve months of advice the board can retire

The adviser's opening contribution, due within the first ninety days, is a recommended leadership structure and an allocation of decision ownership through the integration. By month nine the board should be testing integration commitments against that ownership, with the adviser's challenge on unowned risk on record. By month 12 decision ownership and the board's cadence should be settled, so that integration decisions are taken without advisory support.

Counsel grounded in integration

Through an integration you have kept what the board was told tied to what the operating numbers showed, in organisations with at least $450 million in revenue, 800 people and four countries. Before approving the continuation of an exception you have identified who bore its economic cost. Integration, joint venture and professionalisation experience are examined, together with strategy formation at level 4 and, at level 3, judging risk, owning a P&L and keeping an operating cadence. You can tell which local discretion still serves the business and which should be withdrawn, and you document the line so others can apply it. You can take an unresolved question to the board with a recommendation attached, and you would advise stopping a commitment even while a country head still argued for it.

Selection for the Advisory Chair

It begins with a video call in confidence with the Board of Directors during week one. The Board Chair works through the brief with you in week three. In the fifth week executive leaders from each function meet you in person to test how your advice lands in operations; the full board of directors meets you in the seventh week. Our written view of each step is with you inside two working days.