You are Priya Sundaram, the first chief executive Meridian Pacific Group has ever brought in from outside. On your first Monday in Singapore, the seven executives you inherited all told you the transformation plan made sense; by Friday you had heard that at least two did not believe it. Before the next executive-team meeting, you have to decide what is really behind the resistance of the most powerful of them.
The situation
Meridian is a Singapore-based technology-services group: SGD 3.1 billion of revenue in 2025, an 8% EBIT margin and 11,000 people. Two businesses pull in opposite directions. Legacy infrastructure brings in 62% of revenue and is in slow, structural decline; cloud-and-AI brings in 14%, grows more than 30% a year and is short of capital and people. The board's mandate: lift group growth from 3% to 9% a year within three years by moving SGD 180 million out of infrastructure and into cloud-and-AI.
The lead independent director has given you two quarters to show a top team genuinely behind the plan and one credible early result. The founding family holds 44% of the shares. The founder, now non-executive chair, is out of daily management, yet at least three executives still weigh their positions against what he would think.
In the room, two executives said, unprompted, that the plan was right. Three said yes and nothing since. Two have told colleagues privately that it will not survive contact with reality; one of them is the Infrastructure President, who runs that 62% and whose budget the SGD 180 million would come from. He built the business alongside the founder, and the plan's documents call it "legacy" and "declining". When he objects, he talks about cash: the margin his unit still earns and what happens to it if it is starved of investment. Meanwhile, two senior cloud-and-AI leaders are being courted by rivals and say that staying depends on whether the alignment at the top is real.