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Mandate overview
Key facts for this role. Fields left blank in Studio are omitted here.
- Job Title
- CIO — Global Automotive practice (based India)
- Job Location
- India · Africa / Malaysia
- Experience Range
- 22–28 years
- Industry
- Automotive & Transportation
- Job Function
- CIO
Position overview
Gladwin International Leadership Advisors is representing a confidential organisation in Automotive & Transportation on a senior CIO leadership mandate anchored in India. The remit explicitly spans Africa, Malaysia, Singapore.
This is a country CEO / MD-class mandate with board- and headquarters-facing accountability for strategy execution, regulatory relationships, and brand in-market.
The organisation is looking for pattern recognition: someone who has seen similar complexity before and knows which levers matter first.
Context you will inherit
- Market & sector: New mobility business models — subscription-based mobility, fleet electrification, and B2B mobility services require commercial leaders with non-traditional backgrounds
- Geographic spine: Primary hub India with explicit corridor responsibility across Africa, Malaysia, Singapore.
- Organisation stage: Customer concentration in a handful of strategic accounts shapes both opportunity and reputational risk.
- Stakeholders: Key interfaces include headquarters strategy, regional risk and legal, local regulators (where material), and anchor channel partners.
- Secondary lens: Speed of product development — reducing time-to-market from 48 months (traditional) to 18-24 months (EV-era expectation) requires new product leadership paradigms
The mandate (12–24 month arc)
- Identity & access: Clean up excessive privileges and stale accounts — foundational for both security and audit.
- End-user support: Reduce ticket backlog through root-cause fixes, not perpetual firefighting.
- Asset lifecycle: Refresh hardware and end-of-life software on a predictable cadence.
- Business continuity: Tabletop exercises that surface real gaps in dependencies and communications.
- Innovation intake: Lightweight process for business-led experiments that don’t bypass architecture guardrails.
- Vendor concentration: Mitigate single-supplier risk for critical platforms.
Responsibilities (representative)
- Improve IT demand management and portfolio governance with the executive committee.
- Upgrade vendor management — SLAs, penalties, and outcome-based contracts.
- Sponsor integration discipline post-M&A for systems and data.
- Build IT financial transparency — chargeback or showback where helpful.
- Develop IT leadership team with mix of supplier management and internal delivery strength.
Leadership profile
- Judgment: High signal-to-noise under pressure; ethical clarity; willingness to halt initiatives that break risk appetite.
- Communication: Executive presence in English; additional languages valued where market-relevant.
- Education: Strong undergraduate grounding; MBA / advanced degree / professional qualification common at this level.
- Service leadership: IT organisation trusted for reliability, cost transparency, and partnership.
- Geographic muscle: Comfort operating from India with regular engagement across Africa, Malaysia.
Team & culture
The organisation runs hot — ambitious targets and thin buffers. You need to channel energy into sustainable rhythms: predictable planning, honest risk surfacing, and recovery time for teams after major pushes.
Success measures (examples)
- Financial: Revenue and margin vs. plan; cash conversion; capital efficiency.
- Strategic: Share in priority segments; customer retention in anchor accounts; milestone delivery on transformation.
- People: Engagement trends; regrettable attrition in critical roles; diversity of succession slate.
- Risk: Audit and regulatory outcomes; conduct events; operational resilience metrics.
First 90 days (orientation arc)
- Days 1–30: Shadow key customer journeys or operations — paper over slides where reality diverges.
- Days 30–60: Cut or pause low-value projects freeing capacity for strategic work.
- Days 60–90: Publish first integrated forecast or plan under your ownership — even if directional.
- Build trust with risk, legal, and audit through transparency — surprises erode licence to move fast.
- Pick one cultural signal (e.g. meeting hygiene, promotion criteria) and model it relentlessly.
Stakeholder map (illustrative)
- Internal: Matrix of global product houses and local P&L; tension is normal — your role is to broker trade-offs with data.
- External: Customers who influence reference deals; government or industry bodies in regulated sectors.
- Capital providers: Banks, sponsors, or minority investors — each needs a slightly different narrative on risk.
Travel & mobility
Multi-hub rhythm — plan for weekly or bi-weekly cross-border travel during integration or transformation peaks.
Compensation
Competitive CIO compensation for Automotive & Transportation leadership: cash, incentive, benefits, and potential equity or carry (case-dependent). Discussed with finalists only.
Application process
Gladwin International is managing this search confidentially. Shortlisted candidates will engage in structured conversations with the firm’s partners before client introduction. Please apply through the careers portal with a concise note on why this geography, sector, and remit fit your trajectory.
We review every submission personally; unsolicited outreach to the end client is discouraged and may disqualify candidacy.
Reference: automotive-transportation · CIO · India · Gladwin International Leadership Advisors