SOUTH & SOUTH EAST ASIA . PEOPLE SPEND AS CAPITAL ALLOCATION
You're probably overpaying for underperformance.
We work with founders and boards whose teams in South and Southeast Asia have stopped performing the way they should. We find where the structure broke - and what it costs, in numbers you can take back to a P&L.
"In most teams we've observed between 50–200 people in this region, the drag isn't in the bottom performers. It's in the layer just below leadership — people promoted past their leverage point, too embedded to move. That layer typically costs more than founders estimate. Often by a factor of two or three."
- From 20 years of operational experience BUILDING AND ADIVISNG BUSINESSES across SEA
WHAT WE KEEP SEEING
Five patterns across the region
The real problem is a layer above where it seems to be
When a team lead is underperforming, founders look at the person as the problem. We look at what they're accountable for versus what authority they actually have. In most cases, those two things don't match (often as a result of a reorganization or promotion decision nobody documented properly.
The org chart and the actual org are two different companies
The chart shows a clean hierarchy. The real org has a 12-person Slack thread where decisions actually happen, two people nobody reports to but everyone defers to, and a process that requires founder sign-off on things that should have been delegated in 2022. We map the real one.
Hierarchy and culture interact differently here
Direct upward feedback is structurally suppressed across most of this region and it isn't because people lack opinions, but because the cost of voicing them is real. Surveys and 360s don't capture this. You need someone who knows how to read the gap between what people say and what they mean.
Structural drag compounds silently
It's hard to name it but structural drag often shows up as decisions that take two weeks instead of two days, projects that are always 80% done, mid-layer managers who are competent but somehow never move things. By the time it's visible enough to name, the cost has compounded.