Operations is the layer where strategy meets reality. From COOs to plant heads to supply chain leaders, we work with the people who make the business actually do what the strategy says it will.
The COO role has become more varied than it used to be. In some businesses it is a CEO-track appointment, the natural successor to the chief. In others, it is a peer to the CEO, running operations while the CEO runs strategy and the market. The brief shapes the search; the candidate pool is different in each case.
Plant Head leadership is where India's industrial reality lives. Greenfield commissioning, brownfield expansion, turnaround, ESG and EHS transformation — different situations call for different profiles. We map plant leaders carefully because the strongest ones are running important sites today and are not looking.
Supply chain leadership has been transformed by the last few years. COVID, geopolitical realignment, the China-plus-one shift, and the rise of AI in planning and procurement have all reshaped what good looks like. Leaders comfortable with all of these at once are rare.
EHS, quality, and process safety leadership is no longer a compliance function. Boards now treat these as senior leadership conversations — and the candidates worth meeting are often already running a function the size of a small business unit.
The strongest operations leaders are typically already running a critical operation today. The first response to outreach is rarely interest; it is curiosity about why the conversation is happening. Building trust before the brief is the work that retained search uniquely does.
Greenfield experience is genuinely rare and is checked carefully. A leader who has actually commissioned a comparable plant, on a comparable timeline, in a comparable geography is a small pool everywhere we operate.
Operations leadership has become more cross-functional than it was. The strongest COOs we present now have moments of strategy work, commercial exposure, or finance fluency in their CVs. Pure operations careers without these crossovers rarely make it into the most senior seats.
The most senior seats in a business.
Open →From CFOs to audit committee chairs.
Open →The leaders who win the market.
Open →The leaders who build leadership capability.
Open →From CIO to CTO to Chief Data Officer.
Open →From General Counsel to board-level legal seats.
Open →Strategy, M&A and the leaders behind the next phase.
Open →Reputation, public affairs and the voice of the business.
Open →Every enquiry is handled in confidence. Tell us about the role, and we will tell you honestly whether it is one we can do justice to.
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