M K Chan

Thirty years inside dynamic teams, boardrooms and leadership suites across multinationals - including Deloitte and Singapore Technologies - really does things to how one sees organisations. One stops taking the official narrative at face value. Instead, one starts reading the room behind the room.What I kept seeing was the same pattern dressed in different clothes. Talented people stall without understanding why. Credit and blame consistently travel to the same people - nothing new there! Environments curated to look functional from the outside while something rots at the core. Decision-makers who had, without anyone naming it, arranged everything in their favour - information, narrative, accountability, reward - leaving everyone else to navigate a game whose rules they don't fully understand. The mechanics of all that intrigued me and teased the detective out of me. I studied them, and eventually unearthed the behavioral patterns, the dynamic undercurrent belied by a calm surface and the gap between how organisations present themselves and how power actually moves inside them.I root for two kinds of people. Leaders who sense something is quietly wrong in their organisation and want to understand it clearly enough to fix it, and professionals who are getting uneasy inside that environment but can't put a finger on it.Outside of work, I fix things, literally. If something at home is broken, I'll find a way to adapt or create a solution that addresses the root of the problem. I listen to audiobooks and lectures in the car because sleep is for sleeping and commutes are for learning. And when the day calls for it, a good Islay single malt, neat, is as close to a Zen garden as I need.