Entrepreneurs, investors, and business leaders face an ever-evolving landscape where adaptability is crucial. Navigating regulatory complexities, maintaining team alignment, and embracing disruptive technologies can feel overwhelming. In such an environment, having a leader who thrives in ambiguity and helps organizations achieve “the right to operate and scale” can be invaluable. This article features insights from Desmond Yong, an expert in compliance, the public sector, and cryptocurrency—someone who knows how to transform challenges into opportunities. Whether you’re scaling a startup or driving growth in a larger organization, Desmond Yong’s wisdom will resonate.
Key Takeaways
- Ensuring team alignment with company vision is crucial, even if it means letting go of top performers.
- Remote-first organizations thrive with clear communication rules and respect for work-life balance.
- Clear communication on long-term value helps balance shareholder demands with sustainability goals.
- Trusting your gut is vital, but leaders need a devil’s advocate to challenge biases and narrow thinking.
Highlights
Leadership and Technology Insights from Desmond Yong
Q: What recent strategic decision challenged your leadership philosophy, and how did you navigate it?
A: As the company grows, there will be more employees and diversity of employees from different culture, backgrounds and education. Hence there might be employees’ whose values might misaligned with the team or company’s. The employees themselves aren’t the issues, in fact they can be among the top performers within the company.
However, as we are still within the startup stage, it is important to ensure that we have team members that aligned with the company’s vision. Therefore, sometimes as painful as it is, we need to ensure that our team while lean is close-knit with the same vision.
Q: How are you adapting your organization’s culture to meet the evolving expectations of today’s workforce?
A: Since Covid, many realise that working remotely can be as efficient as working in office. Many also started to focus on the importance of work-life balance. These trends in fact provide a competitive edge for my company as we are remote first as it allows us to tap on talents globally and not restricted to locations and visa. Hence, we can expand to different regions of the world without even a physical office in that location.
However, this makes communication very important to gel the team and ensuring information flow is efficient. Hence the use of technology, (e.g. Slack, Zoom, WhatsApp) is important. Setting rules of engagement is important to ensure that everyone is aligned on which channels are meant for what form of communication. For example, conducting formal approval and compliance matters via emails (for audit trail purposes) while doing quick brainstorming session via Slack.
Another point of setting clear rules is important. Understanding that today’s workforce places importance on work-life balance, there’s need to demonstrate it from the top. Usually, I wouldn’t message or ping my colleagues after work or during weekend. However, sometimes unexpected emergency might happen, and when there’s such a requirement I would usually have explain the emergency (why it is emergency) and hence the need to get back after office hour. Sometimes, I might have a lightbulb about some issues that I have the urge to post after office hours, I would usually state that its not urgent matters just posting it in the group chat, there’s no need for a response and we can discuss this the following day or work day. Stating clear and rationale is important especially for cases that is beyond the usual work and hours.
Q: What emerging technology or industry trend do you believe will be most disruptive to your sector in the next 5 years?
A: Real World Asset (RWA) tokenisation is going to transform the value transfer globally, bringing frictional value transfer. For example, the ownership of real estate can be fractionise into tokens and could be access by retailers when it’s previously unable to do so. Currently, we are seeing luxury items, real estate, US treasury bills, bonds being tokenise.
Second, the use of AI shall bring the focus on the issues of ethics and IPs of AI products even as more companies are embracing them. More and more companies are leveraging on AI but this shall also magnify the issues of ethics, IPs and even legal liability. Who shall be responsible for the work of AI? How can we ensure that users’ information and data are protected and are being informed of their usage?
Next, I believe the race for CBDCs among countries shall heat up in recent years as more Government are pushing for CBDCs for various reasons including political ones.
Q: How do you balance short-term shareholder expectations with long-term sustainability goals?
A: The most important factor for any shareholders are value creation. Hence the conversation with them shouldn’t be around whether its short-term or long-term but if its create values for the organisations and for the shareholders. Some value creations can be realise in a short timeframe where others might require a delayed realisation of value. We need a clear communication to shareholders and stakeholders on why such longer timeframe value and the how the benefits to them overweight the value that they receiving now. Once both sides are aligned on the stake and the values involved, it is easier to convince them.
Q: Can you describe a significant failure in your career and the most important lesson you learned from it?
A: I won’t view as failure but more of a learning. In my younger days, I always view many matters in binary terms (i.e. yes or no, right or wrong) and often it is based on my experience and perspective. As a result, there are times where I failed to consider other viewpoints or perspectives and taking action based on my own experience and perspective that resulted in loss oppurunities. Therefore as I grow older (and hopefully wiser), I realise the importance of looking from multiple perspectives of things and sometimes decisions are a matter of binary decision but could be multi faceted.
Q: What book, experience, or mentor has had the most profound impact on your leadership style, and why?
A: There’s no particular book or leadership style that I follow but I do love to read books/memoir of charismatic leaders like Richard Branson of Virgin and Steve Jobs of Apple. Something common that I found from them is that sometimes in life and leadership, you need to trust your guts and instincts. There are times where the world might think its a bad idea but if you feel strongly about something, and your instincts tell you so, at times, it might be worthwhile following your instincts instead of the conventional wisdom.
No matter how much of a charismatic leader you are, you always need someone else who can play the devil advocate and being able to do so without any biases or fear of repercussions. This is important as sometimes your view at the top might be too narrow to make the right decision. Or as a founder, you might be overly attached to something that will blind your judgement.
Turning Challenges into Opportunities: Lessons for Modern Leaders
As industries evolve and the boundaries between technology and regulation blur, leaders must remain both adaptable and visionary. The conversation with Desmond Yong highlights the importance of aligning teams with company values, balancing short-term wins with long-term impact, and staying ahead of the curve on emerging technologies. For entrepreneurs and innovators, the lessons shared by Desmond Yong serve as a powerful reminder that success comes from both trusting your instincts and being open to new perspectives. Embrace complexity, and your organization can thrive in even the most uncertain times!
Highlights
Read the Chinese version here.
