Oxblood Op-Ed: put the argument your industry is having on the front page

A thin line across the top carries his role, his availability and his name. Below a heavy rule, the essay's topic, date and reading time sit in small type, and then the title runs in very large serif lettering down the wider left column: the claim about undocumented processes. Its standfirst follows, explaining that the deadline is rarely the danger, with a link reading Read the argument. To the right, his portrait appears in black and white beneath a peach bar, captioned with his name and title.

For a CIO, opening this way changes the reader's question. A board member arriving from a search firm's shortlist expects a list of systems. Instead the page asks whether they agree with him about substitution, and only then shows who he is.

Next comes the only light surface on the home page: a cream band with wine lettering, headed The conviction behind the work. It carries his philosophy, that knowing who can write to a machine, a ledger or a dealer's customer record tells you most of what an IT department is for. The reversal of colour makes it read like a pulled quotation in a newspaper.

Under the band, his remaining essays appear as a numbered agenda, 02 and 03, set as large linked headlines. One argues that plants are only as closed as their maintenance contracts; the other asks manufacturers to count the AI pilots they stopped. Three headline figures follow: RMB 38.6 billion of revenue, 610 technology colleagues and 236,000 connected machines. The authored home then sets out his thesis, three introductory paragraphs and four proof points, from six plants moved to domestic software to an assistant restricted to cited answers.

Oxblood sets cream text on a wine ground close to the colour of dried paint on a loader frame, with a soft peach for links, dates and rules. Raised panels use a slightly lighter wine. The palette avoids the cool blues that technology sites default to, which matters for a CIO whose audience is plant directors, a finance chief and directors with industrial backgrounds rather than software buyers.

The composition loads DM Serif Display for headlines and Archivo for text. The serif gives an essay title the authority of a newspaper headline; Archivo, a plain grotesque, keeps figures, dates and record tables plain and legible. Together they let a technical argument read as a public position rather than a product brief.

His impact page holds four decisions that a sceptical reader of the front page would want to examine: sequencing a domestic ERP by readiness, keeping dealers' customer data in Frankfurt and Singapore, stopping the Hefei plant for 58 hours after ransomware, and limiting a service assistant to answers it could cite. Each records who objected and what Ruoshan gave up.

The career page, titled The record behind the argument, sets each of his five roles under its own heavy rule with dates, scope and reporting line in a four-column fact grid. The readiness page, headed Where I would stand in the boardroom, places his contribution in a raised panel edged in peach, then pairs his judgement examples with a narrower column of committees, exposure and time. It states plainly that CSRC rules reserve the audit committee's convenor role for an accounting professional, so he would join as a member.

Op-Ed suits any leader whose strongest asset is a position others in the industry dispute: a chief operating officer arguing against a fashionable automation plan, a chief risk officer with a view on supplier concentration, a CFO who reports remediation differently from peers. It needs at least two well-argued essays with propositional titles. Leaders who prefer to be judged first on their record should choose a composition that opens with the career.