Why the world needs the unreasonable and relentless few who move first

This story is part of The Peak Singapore’s Power List. The list is an annual recognition that celebrates and acknowledges individuals who have demonstrated exceptional leadership, influence, and impact.

The theme for the class of 2025 is Vanguards, spotlighting business leaders who are boldly reshaping their industries, questioning outdated norms, and pushing boundaries with vision and conviction. At a time when conformity is often rewarded and change met with resistance, these individuals choose to lead from the front — not for applause, but because the future demands it.

Every vanguard, by definition, is a threat to someone else’s status quo. 

Be a vanguard, anyway.

The world celebrates progress in hindsight, when the sharp edges have been dulled and the new order looks inevitable. But the moment of true vanguard action — when comfort gives way to discomfort, when applause fades into awkward silence — is rarely celebrated in real time. That’s precisely when the future is forged. When the crowd grows quiet and the path ahead looks uncertain, be a vanguard anyway.

Of course, not all disruption is progress. The question isn’t whether you’re willing to upset people. It’s whether you’re building something genuinely better than what exists. A true vanguard, like the nine featured in the following pages, doesn’t seek resistance for its own sake, but accepts it as the price of meaningful change.

They solve problems others haven’t fully recognised yet. They see the gap between what is and what could be, then do the unglamorous work of closing it.

And make no mistake — this work will be lonelier than any entrepreneurship conference suggests. Most people will never know what it means to be out in front, to walk willingly into a fog of uncertainty and doubt. Those who do — who build, question, iterate, and sometimes fail spectacularly — know that the cost is real. Success is always provisional. Failure is more visible. The critics are louder than the supporters. 

Yet, progress was never meant to be a group activity. It starts with a relentless few who refuse to wait for permission. When isolation feels like your only companion, be a vanguard anyway.

This will, inevitably, be difficult because the status quo is an obstinate beast. It survives by making the exceptional feel unreasonable, by rewarding conformity with comfort and punishing audacity with isolation. It whispers that your timing is wrong, your vision too radical, your methods too disruptive.

But what the status quo doesn’t want you to know is that vanguards aren’t chasing attention; they’re chasing a possibility that only they can see clearly enough to pursue despite the obstacles. Society will celebrate you only once your radicalism no longer poses a threat.

The rebel becomes the founder, the founder becomes the keynote speaker, and soon, the ideas that once shook the establishment become slides in someone else’s deck. When the establishment offers you a seat at their table, stay a vanguard anyway.

This pressure intensifies when you’re in a position of leadership. If you lead anything — a team, a company, a movement — there will come a moment when standing still feels easier than moving forward. When the incentives to fit in quietly outweigh the risk of standing out. Or when your board, your investors, your team all seem to suggest that maybe, just maybe, you should slow down. 

That is the test. 

Still, this isn’t a call to be reckless, but rather to recognise that meaningful leadership involves embracing the friction of change. To choose conviction over comfort, especially when the room goes silent. When they ask you to be reasonable, be a vanguard anyway.

The alternative — waiting for consensus — will always feel safer. It’s tempting to smooth your edges, soften your demands, and present a more palatable version of your vision to the world. To let focus groups and market research water down what you know needs to exist. 

However, every breakthrough that shifts an industry or culture comes from someone unwilling to be domesticated by committee thinking. This is the difference between success and significance: one seeks applause, the other seeks lasting change. When you sense resistance, let that be information, not a constraint. The discomfort might mean you’re onto something real.

What the world actually needs is not more consensus. It requires more people willing to take the first, difficult step toward what comes after. It requires those who are willing to risk misunderstanding and discomfort, not for the sake of being different, but for the possibility of creating something that wasn’t there before. It needs builders who the architects of the status quo won’t deter.

To those who refuse to wait for history’s blessing or the market’s reassurance, who bear the cost of disruption not for glory but for the chance to solve real problems: keep going. Challenge the rest of us to follow. Show us what’s possible when someone refuses to accept what is.

Every vanguard is a threat to the status quo. 

Where community rewards conformity and punishes audacity, when the safest path seems the wisest path, when the cost of change feels higher than the price of staying still — be a vanguard, anyway.

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