Who Decides What in a Group of Companies: When It Is Time for the Owner to Delegate

By Bagdat Zhaxygeldin, founder of JB Solutions

A business grows, and at some point one company turns into a group. A separate legal entity appears for a new line of business, then for a new region, then for a site or a large contract. Construction, mining, transport and trading holdings in Kazakhstan follow a similar path: the structure grows faster than the rules for managing it.

While the group is small, every decision converges on the owner. This works as long as the owner can keep up. When there are five, ten or fifteen companies, every decision raises the question: who makes it, the center or the company, and who is accountable for the result? If there is no written answer, the speed of the group is set by the throughput of one person.

Large companies have studied this problem for a long time, and the conclusions carry over to mid-sized groups.

McKinsey, in its State of Organizations 2026 report (a survey of more than 10 thousand executives, June and September 2025), writes that fewer than a quarter of organizations achieve a lasting effect from change. Among the obstacles to reallocating budgets and people, 38% of executives name slow decision-making [1].

The same report gives the example of one company where 35% of decisions were duplicated across functions, there were 60% more meetings than at comparable companies, and more than a thousand hours a month went into manual reporting [1]. This is a single case, but it shows well what blurred authority costs.

Something else is encouraging. When companies deliberately rebuild their operating model, results keep improving: in the 2025 McKinsey survey (2,000 executives, 16 industries), 63% of such projects achieved most of their goals, compared with 21% ten years ago [2]. Order in management is achievable if it is treated as a task in its own right.

A separate problem concerns the people entrusted with an end-to-end process: procurement, month-end close, settlements with suppliers across all companies in the group. EY, in a 2025 study (more than 250 participants), found that 80% of companies face at least one constraint on the role of such a process owner: insufficient reach, no authority over the budget, or no right to decide on systems. Half of the companies have no clear division of authority between those who run current operations and those who transform them [3]. HFS Research in September 2026 puts the same conclusion more briefly: there is accountability for the result, but no authority to deliver it [4].

In recent years the country's largest holdings have written a clear principle into their corporate governance rules: the center is responsible for strategy, capital and control, while the group companies are responsible for operational management, including personnel, procurement and production. At the level of principle, the boundary is drawn.

In private groups that grew out of a single business, the picture is usually different. In our observation, it consists of several typical features:

It is too early for such a group to call in a large consulting firm and launch a large-scale transformation. It first needs to put in place the supports on which growth will rest.

AI adds another question to "who decides": who is accountable for decisions that a machine prepares or makes. McKinsey, in its State of Organizations 2026 report, names AI as one of three forces pushing companies to rethink how work, end-to-end processes and traditional structures are organized. At the same time, most organizations do not yet see a noticeable effect of AI on their financial results [1].

In the article "The agentic organization" (September 2025), McKinsey describes what this means for management [5]:

At the level of owners and boards of directors, the topic is only gaining weight. Deloitte, in a survey of 695 board members and executives (early 2025), found that for 31% AI is not yet on the board agenda, compared with 45% a year earlier. Two thirds of respondents say their boards have little or no knowledge and experience of AI [6].

McKinsey's October 5, 2026 review adds two observations about decision rights. First, coordinator roles, the ones that move decisions across the organization (project management, for example), have grown 1.5 to 2.0 times faster than line roles over the past five years. AI can remove part of that complexity, but a flatter structure pays off only if the lost coordination is replaced by better data, clear decision rights and strong human judgment. Second, an AI transformation needs an accountable leader who can move funding and scarce talent and resolve cross-enterprise trade-offs [7].

For a mid-sized group, four questions follow that are worth revisiting together with the decision map:

This is our position, based on the research above and on JB Solutions practice in projects on building holding structures, separating businesses and creating shared service centers.

None of these supports requires a large program. They can be put in place within a few months, and they keep their value when the group has grown and the time comes for a major transformation.

If two or three items match, it is worth writing down authority in the group.

Transformation and shared service centers. JB Solutions has experience of transforming management in large companies in Kazakhstan and Central Asia: in mining and metallurgy, oil and gas, railways, technology and telecom. We created shared service centers and holding structures, distributed functions among the legal entities of groups, and rebuilt processes and organizational structure. More on the page Management and Consulting.

AI practice. For us, AI is a working tool that we apply in our own projects and implement for clients:

If your group has grown faster than the rules for managing it, we will start with a diagnostic: take two or three key processes, review who decides what in them today, and propose a decision map for the whole group.