Asia Pacific Leadership Brief 1H 2026

Asia Pacific looks different from the head office.

The Asia Pacific Leadership Brief draws on confidential conversations with regional executives across the region to examine the structural issues that sit behind growth, margin and execution.

It is written for executives at headquarters and in Asia-Pacific who want to understand what is getting lost between the two. This briefing draws on candid conversations with regional and commercial leaders across Asia-Pacific, ranging from SMEs to mid-caps with 50 to 1,000 employees in the region. The striking finding is how little the sector mattered. The same handful of issues came back, in almost the same words, from a factory in China and a data business in Singapore.

Key Briefing Areas

Ten Patterns That Recurred

You Are Probably Measuring Your Asia Pacific Region Wrong

Compliance built for one market, applied to all

You sit at a narrow point between a head office that sets the strategy and a market that has to make it real, and the defining work is holding both at once. The image several people used was the hourglass: everything passes through one point, and that point is you.

If your Asia Pacific margin keeps reading thinner than the business feels it is, the measurement is the likelier problem, notthe operation.

A disadvantage if held rigidly, a real risk if held loosely, with the judgement left to one person

The patterns nobody outside the region sees
Download Report II
The structural cost on no one's scorecard
Download Report I