To distinguish adaptation from reflex, today’s leaders need organisational ambidexterity

The pressure to reinvent has become one of the defining conditions of modern business. In PwC’s 2025 Asia Pacific CEO Survey, 45 per cent of respondents said their companies would remain viable for less than a decade if they continued along their present course.

Fifty-nine per cent had already taken at least one significant step towards reinvention. By 2026, more than four in 10 CEOs globally said their companies had begun competing in sectors beyond their traditional boundaries.

These figures make reinvention sound almost procedural: recognise the threat, redraw the strategy, and proceed. Organisations rarely change so cleanly. Research on “structural inertia” has shown that age and accumulated complexity can constrain how quickly a company moves.

The systems that make an established business dependable — its routines, hierarchies, expertise, and obligations — can also make it resistant to a different future.

That tension sits at the centre of A New Form, this year’s edition of The Peak Power List.

Structural consequence

The theme does not celebrate novelty for its own sake. Nor does it reward the cosmetic apparatus of corporate transformation — you know the type: a refreshed identity, an adjacent product line, or the sudden insertion of artificial intelligence into an otherwise unchanged proposition.

Instead, it examines leaders who recognised that the form of their organisation no longer matched the work it needed to do, then altered something fundamental about how it created value.

Some moved from supplier to manufacturer. Others transformed inherited businesses, crossed industry boundaries, or built models that challenged the conventions of their sectors. Their circumstances differ, but each confronted the same difficult question: What happens when the idea that produced success begins to restrict what comes next?

Management scholars describe one answer as “dynamic capability”: the capacity to sense change, seize an emerging opportunity, and reconfigure an organisation around it. The theory matters because it distinguishes adaptation from reflex. A leader can respond to every new fashion and still lack a coherent direction. A new form must come from an exacting reading of what has changed, what remains useful, and what the organisation can credibly become.

This year’s selection therefore looked for structural consequence. The emphasis fell on decisions that changed a company’s role, market, operating logic, or relationship with its customers. It also looked for continuity beneath the change.

Reinvention becomes meaningless when a business discards its centre each time conditions change. The strongest transformations preserve a conviction even as they renegotiate almost everything around it.

Restraint mattered, too. Business culture tends to equate ambition with accumulation: more markets, products, partnerships, and attention. Yet research on organisational “ambidexterity” argues that enduring performance requires companies to exploit what they already do well while continuing to explore what they might do next. The balance shifts as circumstances change; expansion alone does not resolve it.

Several leaders on this list embody that less theatrical form of ambition. They knew when to add, when to subtract, and when to refuse an opportunity to protect the coherence of the larger transformation.

Of inheritance and innovation

A New Form offers no universal formula, because genuine reinvention cannot emerge from imitation. Instead, these nine stories present a set of provocations. They ask readers to examine which inherited assumptions still deserve loyalty, which have hardened into liabilities, and whether the systems built for yesterday can accommodate the demands of tomorrow.

The hope is that readers find permission here: to change before crisis makes the choice for them, to understand that a previous form need not have failed to become inadequate, and to see transformation as an act of discernment rather than spectacle.

The future will not favour change for change’s sake. It will favour those who know what must endure, what must move, and when the difference becomes impossible to ignore.

For more stories on The Peak Power List, visit here.