When operations and commercial must be governed together

Late last week I was contacted by a recruitment firm about a COO role.

My deepest experience lies in commercial leadership, business development and change. Still, the role, the company and the industry sparked genuine curiosity.

It is an industry and a company I know from before, and one I have had my eye on for a long time. It involves complex value chains, many dependencies and a clear need to get operations, customers, partner networks, quality and economics working better together.

That made me reflect on a challenge that is relevant in far more organisations:

How do leaders discover friction, deviations and suboptimal situations early enough to prioritise the right action and use resources where they actually create impact?

A challenge with one partner can affect delivery quality, capacity and cost.

Weak customer development can challenge margin, contract value and future growth.

An operational deviation can have consequences for customer experience, profitability and trust.

This was not a case assignment I was handed. I wanted to challenge the problem myself before the further dialogue in August.

💥 That is why I started the Control Tower project.

I have built a functional concept prototype with one shared entry point and two modules:

👉 Operations Control Tower, focused on partner performance, quality, capacity, cost and risk.

👉 Commercial Control Tower, focused on customer health, margin, contracts, pipeline and commercial follow-up.

The project is built on a simple but demanding governance logic:

Signal → assessment → prioritisation → action → ownership → learning

The goal is not more KPIs or yet another dashboard.

The goal is to make it easier to identify what actually needs attention, understand the consequences and make the next best action visible.

For leaders, this is largely about prioritising actions and resources optimally before challenges become larger, more expensive or harder to solve.

I believe this is relevant for far more than typical COO and CCO roles. Most organisations have data, reports and status meetings. What is often missing is a clear link between signals, priorities, ownership and actual execution.

I look forward to exploring both the role and the project further.

👉 See Control Tower and the project description on the projects page.

And if you want to discuss how similar challenges can be addressed in your role or organisation, feel free to get in touch.

#OperativLedelse #KommersiellLedelse #Beslutningsstøtte #Gjennomføringsevne #KunstigIntelligens