KPMG in Singapore’s Tea Wei Li: Adaptability key to sustained competitiveness, innovation amidst disruption

She said this enables organisations to respond effectively to continuous disruption rather than simply reacting to isolated events.

Singapore’s business landscape has placed strong emphasis on corporate governance, risk management, regulatory compliance and sound decision-making, reflecting its position as a major regional business and financial hub. Organisations are expected to strengthen oversight and manage emerging risks whilst also aligning their operations with the highest standards.

With these priorities increasingly shaping organisations, Tea Wei Li, Partner, Risk, Advisory at KPMG in Singapore, has witnessed this first-hand through her work in helping businesses strengthen risk and governance practices. Having over 20 years of experience in audit and consulting, she has worked with various boards and clients on a broad spectrum of projects and across sectors. She currently focuses on enterprise risk management, corporate governance, compliance review, and internal audit services.

She is also well experienced with corporate governance frameworks and practices for publicly listed and pre-IPO companies and ensuring they align with SGX listing rules, the Code of Corporate Governance, and relevant pre-IPO listing requirements.

As one of the judges for the Singapore Business Review Management Excellence Awards 2026, Wei Li shares her perspectives on how organisations can adapt their management strategies, anticipate emerging risks, and strengthen decision-making amidst evolving stakeholder expectations and an increasingly complex business environment.

How are changing stakeholder expectations influencing the way organisations approach strategy, performance, and decision-making today?

Stakeholder expectations have evolved significantly over the past decade. Traditionally, investors, customers and regulators largely assessed organisations based on financial performance, operational efficiencies and compliance outcomes. Risk management and governance were often viewed as supporting functions focused on protecting value and ensuring organisations stay within regulatory boundaries.

Today, organisations are increasingly being judged not only on what they deliver, but also on how they navigate uncertainty, respond to disruption and create sustainable value in a rapidly changing environment. Whether it is geopolitical tensions, supply chain disruptions, cybersecurity threats, AI adoption or climate-related risks, stakeholders expect management teams to demonstrate foresight, preparedness and sound judgement to unforeseen events.

This has important implications for strategy and decision-making. Today, leaders need to balance efficiency with resilience, innovation and adaptability. For example, strategic decisions will need to be evaluated through multiple lenses, including risk exposure, stakeholder trust, talent implications, regulatory expectations and long-term sustainability.

Expectations around AI illustrate this shift particularly well. Stakeholders view technology adoption alongside the assurance that organisations can deploy AI responsibly, manage risks relating to data privacy and security, and establish clear accountability for outcomes. Similar expectations are emerging across sustainability, cybersecurity and supply chain resilience.

As a result, governance, risk management and compliance can no longer operate alongside strategy. They need to be embedded within strategic planning and business decision-making. Organisations that are able to integrate these considerations effectively are often better positioned to respond to change, maintain stakeholder trust and pursue growth opportunities with greater confidence.

What are the critical areas you see organisations overlook when preparing for future business challenges?

One of the biggest blind spots is when organisations assume that uncertainty is a factor arising from external forces that are beyond their control. The implication is significant. In many cases, organisations do not fail to recognise disruption, but fall short on their decision-making processes or lack the right governance structures needed to help them respond quickly. KPMG’s research has found that some of the top barriers to protecting and growing value were short-term financial pressure, the lack of critical talent and slow decision making. 

The second area is underestimating the need for resilience. For many years, organisations have designed supply chains, operating models and technology architecture around efficiency, scale and cost optimisation. Whilst these approaches delivered benefits in stable conditions, developments in recent years have demonstrated how quickly highly optimised systems can become vulnerable during geopolitical tensions, trade fragmentation, cyber incidents or supply disruptions. Organisations that fail to reassess these assumptions may find themselves increasingly exposed when conditions change, with limited flexibility to respond to new shocks or emerging opportunities.

A third blind spot is focusing on technology adoption rather than technology economics.

Much of the discussion around AI remains centred on implementation and experimentation. However, the more important question is increasingly whether organisations can generate sustainable economic value from their investments. Findings from KPMG’s Q2 AI Pulse report, found that whilst 81 percent of Asia Pacific organisations report business value from AI, only 5 percent are demonstrating meaningful ROI, and more than half have delayed or scaled back AI agents because costs exceeded expected returns.

What role does adaptability play in sustaining business success amidst constant disruption?

We are seeing a fundamental shift in how organisations should think about success. For many years, business strategy was built around the assumption that disruption was temporary. Organisations would experience a shock, stabilise operations, and eventually return to a relatively predictable environment.

Today, that assumption no longer holds. Geopolitical tensions, rapid technological advances, cyber threats, shifting regulations and changing customer expectations are creating a level of uncertainty that is continuous rather than episodic. The question for management teams is no longer how quickly they can recover from disruption, but how effectively they can operate and grow whilst disruption remains a constant feature of the landscape.

This is why adaptability has become such an important capability. Increasingly, competitive advantage comes not from having the best strategy at a single point in time, but from having the ability to continuously refine and reposition that strategy as conditions evolve. Organisations that succeed are often those that can detect change early, make decisions quickly and redirect resources towards emerging opportunities before competitors do.

In many ways, the question is no longer about how accurately you can predict these changes, but more about how well you can prepare for them. Successful organisations build flexibility into their operating models, invest in diverse talent and capabilities, and create governance structures that enable faster and better-informed decision-making.

In the age of technology, adaptability is also closely tied to innovation – where companies that have adapted successfully are often described as those that are able to challenge existing assumptions, rethink business models and embrace new ways of creating value.

What emerging risks do you believe management teams should be paying closer attention to over the next few years?

Management teams should pay closer attention to two less visible but increasingly consequential risks: the fragmentation of trust and growing ecosystem dependency.

Today, trust is being tested across a much broader set of dimensions. Stakeholders are paying closer attention to how organisations use AI, protect data, manage cyber risks, substantiate sustainability claims and make decisions that affect customers, employees and society. 

As a result, trust is increasingly becoming a strategic asset rather than simply a reputational consideration. Organisations can no longer assume that strong business performance alone will sustain stakeholder confidence, and that parameters such as transparency, accountability and robustness will increasingly play a bigger role. Building trusted governance frameworks is therefore becoming as important as pursuing growth and innovation. 

A second emerging risk is ecosystem dependency. Most organisations no longer operate as standalone enterprises. Their ability to deliver products and services depends on an increasingly complex network of cloud providers, technology vendors, outsourced service providers, data partners and digital platforms.

Whilst these ecosystems have enabled efficiency, scalability and innovation, they have also created new forms of concentration risk. A disruption affecting a single provider can have cascading consequences across multiple organisations, industries and markets. In many cases, organisations have strengthened their own controls and resilience, but have less visibility over the resilience of the broader ecosystem they depend on.

How do you expect management excellence to evolve amidst an increasingly complex business landscape?

Apart from the expectations of management teams needing to manage simultaneous risks and regulatory changes, organisational coherence is another aspect that management teams need to place emphasis on.

Management teams will need to ensure that decisions made across different functions reinforce a common strategic direction, rather than allowing technology, risk, talent and business transformation initiatives to advance in isolation. The ability to identify trade-offs, reconcile competing objectives and establish clear accountability will become an increasingly important measure of management effectiveness. This also requires clarity over who is empowered to make decisions, when issues should be escalated and how accountability is maintained across the organisation.

As the business landscape becomes more fragmented, management teams will also need to become comfortable with what may be described as selective consistency. Organisations should remain consistent in their overarching purpose, values and governance standards, whilst recognising that their operating models may need to differ across markets. Regulatory divergence, geopolitical considerations and local market conditions may make a uniform global approach impractical or even counterproductive.

Management excellence will therefore lie in distinguishing where consistency is essential and where differentiation is necessary.

As a returning judge for the Singapore Business Review Management Excellence Awards 2026, what kinds of leadership or management initiatives do you hope will emerge more prominently amongst this year's nominees?

Leadership excellence will increasingly depend on building adaptable organisations.

Key initiatives include: building workforce capabilities through continuous reskilling, AI literacy, and talent development; streamlining governance and decision-making to improve agility and execution speed; strengthening scenario planning, resilience testing, and crisis preparedness; embedding AI, cybersecurity, and data governance into business transformation and operating models; fostering a culture of innovation, experimentation, and cross-functional collaboration; integrating risk management, compliance and strategy to improve responsiveness to geopolitical, cyber, and regulatory developments; and enhancing operational resilience across supply chains, technology platforms, and third-party ecosystems. 

These initiatives help organisations move beyond reacting to disruption and build the agility, resilience and innovation capabilities needed to sustain long-term competitiveness.