Jean-Michel Wu

Jessica Davey didn't come to Singapore to run a regional office. She came to build one. GUT's first footprint in Asia wasn't about planting a flag. It was about proving that a creative business could operate with serious impact in one of the most culturally layered regions in the world, without losing the edge that made it matter. Eighteen months in, the numbers looked right. Zero to fourteen people. Early client wins. Strong creative talent. By most external measures, the build was working....

Most agency leadership teams are assembled one hire at a time. Individual quality is rarely the problem. Here is what leadership advisory in Singapore actually looks for — and why team effectiveness is a separate discipline from recruitment.

I had a conversation recently with a senior HR leader inside one of the world's largest creative holding groups. He had approval. He had the mandate. He had been fighting the same battle for three years. He wanted to build an internal talent acquisition function from scratch. And the closer we got to talking about how, the clearer it became that the real problem was not the technology. It never is. The Vendor Problem Nobody Wants to Name Large organisations do not build internal...