Head of Supply Chain Insights and Trends Practice

Opportunity

Don’t ignore this job ad—you will look back on it as 5 minutes well spent. Yes, you are doing well in your current role, but why not kick it up a gear and truly excel by helping me develop an insights practice at a truly global company undergoing an exciting corporate transformation? I am the Head of Global Strategic Insights at Maersk and I am looking for someone special like you to lead the Supply Chain Insights practice and Trends Lab. If you relish a challenge, have strong learning agility, can manage ambiguity, and have an appetite for building capabilities and analytic insights, this is the job for you.

We offer

Now for the even better part. This is a new role with the opportunity to grow and shape the function, products, and impact. It will provide a platform to take a holistic and analytic perspective on logistics supply chains, business models, and technological and customer trends. Most importantly, it will provide an opportunity to impact Maersk’s industry leading integrator strategy.

You will work in a high-profile environment. The practice is part of the Strategic Insights team in the Corporate Strategy Department, reporting to the CEO of Maersk. The practice will comprise 3 people initially, sitting within the Strategic Insights team totalling around 15 colleagues with a range of backgrounds and professional experience. It is an inter-disciplinary environment, where you work in an agile and flexible way to generate knowledge and insights for the organization. And the best part is that you will play a key role in shaping the practice, defining what good looks like and hiring the team to join you on this journey.

Welcome to the Maersk family. We are a purpose-driven company with people that have a wide-range of skill sets and backgrounds. You will be a spider at the center of the web shaping and delivering perspectives and supply chain insights. That will bring you a large network of counterparts and close collaboration with colleagues across the organization including in the commercial, strategy, M&A, growth, and logistics teams.

Key responsibilities

Sounds too good to be true? Well, it will take someone special like you to fill the role—but don’t be bashful. Even if you don’t fulfil all the elements that we are looking for, you probably have a strong appetite for this role and a fundamental skill set, curiosity, and a can-do attitude to be successful. We will support you grow into the role.

Okay, so this is what you will doing. You will be responsible for leading the Supply Chain Insights practice and Trends Lab. The first core purpose is to build market intelligence around the logistics market. Focus areas will include customer needs, market sizing, growth potential, market attractiveness, competitive intensity, technology and digital landscape, service delivery models, and business model innovation across the logistics supply chain. The second core purpose will be to develop the Trends Lab, generating insights on longer-term trends impacting the logistics landscape with a strong emphasis on drawing-out strategic implications (the so what) for the business and Maersk’s integrator strategy.

Not an ivory tower. We know that you enjoy pulling together a holistic picture grounded in research, data work, and triangulation. But we also know that you need to get out and about to discuss, test understanding, and gather knowledge. Fortunately, Maersk is a large organization with plenty of opportunity to interact and learn from colleagues from across the world and disciplines. Some of your core counterparts will be the product and vertical heads, the M&A team, and strategy leads who are at the forefront of building-out Maersk’s integrator strategy. But talking shop internally only gets you so far. You will also be engaging externally with think tanks and research houses to complement and challenge our internally generated perspectives. And of course, Maersk has a very large customer base that is hungry to discuss and share perspectives on these topics. You will be contributing thought-leadership to those conversations.

Who are we looking for

Because you can meet most of the following elements, or have outstanding skills in some of them paired with a strong learning agility, we will be having a conversation soon:

· Knowledge of the logistics sector either from working in a logistics company or being a knowledge expert at a consultancy or similar

· Experience in building market insights and outlooks

· Capable of building insights drawing on data sources, estimation, triangulation techniques, and hypothesis testing

· Ability to structure complex questions and to work with ambiguous topics

· A knowledge network and understanding of the analytic tools and data sources needed to build strategic insight into the logistics sector

· A strong interest in macro and micro trends shaping the logistics industry, and an ability to drive and shape the Lab work and generate insights for the business

· An understanding of the end-customer (and the customers’ customer)

· Ability and appetite to establish strong working relationships across the organization and comfortable working with M&A processes.

· Excellent communication skills and an ability to explain complexities in compelling and clear terms

· Successful leadership experience will be appreciated but it is not a must – however, we do expect you to be sincerely interested in leading and developing people while creating strong followership

Since we are an international team, fluency in written and spoken English is a must.

For more information on the position please contact Graham L. Slack, Chief Economist, and Head of Strategic Insights.

As a performance-oriented company, we strive to always recruit the best person for the job – regardless of gender, age, nationality, sexual orientation or religious beliefs. We are proud of our diversity and see it as a genuine source of strength.