Aligning the Top Team — A Transformation Under the Board's Clock

A four-round executive-leadership simulation set inside Meridian Pacific Group, a Singapore-headquartered diversified technology-services company (SGD 3.1bn revenue, 8% EBIT, 11,000 staff). For the first time in its history the board has appointed an external CEO with a three-year mandate to shift capital from a declining legacy-infrastructure unit (62% of revenue) to a fast-growing cloud-and-AI division (14%, +30% a year), lifting group growth from 3% to 9%. The catch: the inherited top team says yes in the room and resists everywhere else, the retiring founder is now non-executive chair and 'still in the room' psychologically, and the lead independent director has granted just two quarters of patience. Playing the new CEO and inner circle, you must (1) read both conscious and unconscious top-team cues — distinguishing the Infrastructure President's rational capital argument from the identity and status anxiety beneath it, and deciding whether to attend to the founder's shadow; (2) choose an aligning mechanism that contains anxiety appropriately rather than forcing compliance by fear; (3) sequence the transformation message and pick one credible early win under the board-confidence constraint; and (4) hold a Q2 board update while the founder-chair probes whether the team is really aligned or merely compliant. Built on Narasimhan's work on leading transformation journeys, top-team and board dynamics, and the powers of containment, the math rewards genuine alignment, deliberate sequencing, and bringing the chair along — and punishes the five classic errors: taking 'yes' at face value, treating identity resistance as a debate to be won, aligning by fear, leading with capital reallocation before the team is aligned, and ignoring the founder's lingering influence. Final KPIs track genuine Alignment, Transformation Momentum, Board Confidence, and Derailment Risk, with a hidden compliance-versus-alignment reckoning surfaced in the debrief.