The portfolio can be diversified while the risks remain connected
The Board seeks an independent director to chair enterprise risk across multiple products, plants, markets and investment horizons. Diversification reduces some exposures but can hide common dependencies: commodity and energy cost, supplier concentration, customer cycles, leverage, technology, management capacity, safety culture and reputation. The Chair's role is to reveal those connections and help the Board decide how much correlated risk it is prepared to carry.
Risk architecture
The committee will move from a long register to a small set of enterprise scenarios. Each scenario should state the value at risk, warning indicators, control owner, decision rights, liquidity effect, stakeholder consequence and actions available at different points. Management must distinguish prevention, detection, response and recovery rather than label every activity a mitigation.
Operational scenarios will include serious safety events, extended plant outage, critical supplier failure, quality escape, industrial action and logistics interruption. Financial scenarios will include commodity shock, demand contraction, customer failure, covenant pressure and an acquisition that underperforms. Technology scenarios will include cyber compromise of plant or product systems, loss of engineering information and failure of a shared enterprise platform.
Capital allocation through a risk lens
Greenfield capacity, acquisitions, automation and new product platforms should carry explicit stage gates. The committee will test whether readiness, customer qualification, supply, leadership, working capital and downside funding are aligned. Post-investment review should distinguish installation, operational stabilisation and realised economic benefit.
The Chair will challenge whether hurdle rates and scenarios reflect business-specific volatility, execution risk and irreversibility. An attractive base case is not enough where failure consumes scarce management attention or compromises another business.
Safety, climate and resource consequence
Process safety, occupational safety, energy, water, emissions and waste will be reviewed as enterprise risks with financial and operating implications. The Board should receive near misses, barrier health, consent conditions, resource constraints and capital requirements—not only lagging injury or intensity ratios. Climate scenarios should influence site, supply, insurance and investment choices rather than remain a disclosure exercise.
CSR responsibility
As CSR Chair, the director will insist on clear outcomes, community relevance, partner diligence, financial control and beneficiary safeguards. Programmes connected to plant communities should be governed independently of licence-to-operate pressure and should not substitute for remediation of operational impact.
Entry plan for the first 90 days
The Chair will begin with three maps: the ten enterprise risks that can materially alter value; the dependencies shared across businesses; and the actions management believes remain available under stress. One site visit and one capital-project review will test whether the central risk description matches operating reality. The committee will then choose two integrated scenarios for rehearsal and eliminate low-value reporting that does not change a decision. This entry plan is meant to sharpen governance, not launch a parallel risk office.
The person
Ideal candidates have led a diversified industrial enterprise, major manufacturing business, enterprise risk function, industrial finance portfolio or safety-critical operation. They must be able to work across technical domains, quantify uncertainty and chair decisions without becoming the risk owner. M&A, capex and crisis experience will be valued. Appointment requires independence and databank compliance. Expect committee and Board meetings, site visits, an annual scenario exercise and rapid availability for a material incident.
Registration on the IICA Independent Directors Databank is required before appointment. A DIN is not needed to apply: where an appointee does not yet hold one, it is obtained through the appointing company at the point of appointment.