What Asia's Most Successful Founders Can Teach SME Owners About People

On 3 September 2026, McKinsey's Future of Asia podcast released an episode previewing the book Shapers and Founders: The Untold Stories of Asia's Extraordinary Owner-CEOs. The headline figure is striking. According to McKinsey's Center for CEO Excellence, owner-CEOs (people who founded or own the business and also run it) accounted for nearly half of the value created among the top decile of Asian companies over the past two decades. No other ownership category came close.

To understand why, the team interviewed 30 of the region's top owner-CEOs. Cheryl Lim, a partner in McKinsey's Kuala Lumpur office and one of the book's co-authors, described the traits that kept recurring across very different backgrounds, ages and countries. The founders are relentlessly curious and believe they can learn from anyone. They are strong relationship builders who know no one succeeds alone. They draw energy from work they enjoy, and many see no line between work and life. They can hold a long-horizon view and a close eye on daily detail at the same time, taking big bets and then stress-testing them until they become manageable. And for all their scale, they are notably humble. One founder told the interviewers that he wanted to be remembered for having built a company in which people were the best they could be.

Most Singapore SME owners will recognise at least some of themselves in that list. That is exactly why it needs handling with care.

A portrait of winners is not a recipe

McKinsey studied founders who had already succeeded spectacularly. That tells you what the winners have in common. It does not tell you that those traits caused the success, because nobody interviewed the curious, energetic, relationship-building founders whose businesses stalled or failed, and there are many of them. McKinsey does not claim otherwise. But lists like this travel fast on LinkedIn, and by the time they reach a founder's feed they tend to read as a checklist: be more curious, have more energy, and value will follow.

It won't, on its own. Curiosity and energy are real advantages, but they are personality traits, and personality does not scale. A founder can only be curious in the rooms they are in and energetic for the hours they are awake. In a 20- or 50-person business, that ceiling arrives quickly.

The more useful reading of the McKinsey findings is to ask which of these traits the founders turned into something the organisation could do without them. That is where the value came from, and it is also the part an SME can actually copy.

Four traits, and what each one looks like as a system

Curiosity becomes a learning habit, not a founder habit. Lim noted that the founders don't keep their curiosity personal. They try to build it into the organisation. In an SME, the practical version is modest: a regular point where managers bring back what they learned from customers, competitors or their own mistakes, and a founder who visibly changes a decision because of it. If every good idea in the business still has to originate with the owner, the curiosity has not been embedded. It has been bottlenecked.

Relationships become a bench, not a contact list. The founders McKinsey interviewed credit their teams, stakeholders and partners for their success. In a smaller business, the equivalent test is uncomfortable but simple: if you were unreachable for a month, who would make the decisions you currently make? If the honest answer is "nobody", the business has relationships with its founder rather than a leadership team. Building that bench means delegating real decisions, not just tasks, and accepting that some of them will be made differently from how you would make them.

Energy becomes a choice about where the founder's time goes. The founders were described as deliberate about where they spend their time and what actually moves the needle. For most SME owners, the biggest drain on that time is not strategy. It is administration that nobody else has been set up to own: payroll queries, leave disputes, contract templates, the hiring paperwork. We have written before about founders who have quietly become the most expensive administrator in their own company. Protecting founder energy is less about motivation and more about removing work that should never have been theirs.

Holding contradictions becomes a planning discipline. The ability to take a long view while staying close to detail is often described as a gift. In practice, much of it is structure. The big bet gets written down, broken into milestones someone other than the founder owns, and reviewed on a fixed rhythm. That is what McKinsey's founders mean by stress-testing, and it is a habit that can be taught to a leadership team, not just possessed by a founder.

The one trait that is already a system

The trait that stood out most in the interviews was the founders' belief in their people. It is also the one that is least about personality and most about how a business is run.

A founder who wants to be remembered for building a place where people are at their best cannot deliver that through goodwill. It shows up in whether roles are clearly defined, whether pay is fair enough that people are not quietly looking elsewhere, whether managers have been taught to manage, and whether good work is noticed. Those are people systems. They are also exactly the systems many owner-run SMEs never get round to building, because the founder's belief in the team feels like enough.

It rarely is. Belief without structure tends to produce a familiar pattern: loyal early hires who were never given a path, new hires brought in because they "felt like a fit" (a trap we have looked at in the culture-fit trap), and a founder who is still the only person who can resolve a conflict or approve a raise. The belief is real. The organisation just has nowhere to put it.

McKinsey's point about the talent crunch applies directly here. As skills shift and good people become harder to hire and keep, businesses that have turned "we believe in our people" into clear roles, fair pay and real development will hold on to the people competitors are trying to take.

What about the founders who don't fit the mould?

Only three of the 30 founders McKinsey interviewed were women. Lim was direct about why: the pool of female CEOs is small and the pool of female founders is smaller still, shaped by caregiving load, social expectations and unequal access to funding. Her advice to women aiming for the top was not to work harder or sacrifice more, but to be intentional about where time goes, where energy comes from and what support systems surround them.

That advice holds for any SME owner who does not have unlimited hours, which is to say every SME owner. The founders in the book did not succeed by being tireless. They succeeded, in part, by being deliberate about what only they could do and building everything else around them.

Where to start

Pick the trait you most recognise in yourself and ask the harder question: does the business still do it when you are not in the room? If curiosity, relationships and belief in people all run through you personally, you have a founder-shaped business, and its ceiling is your calendar. If you are too close to the problem to see it clearly, that is normal. It is also the point at which an outside, senior view is most useful.

Building the people systems that let a founder's best instincts outlast their personal involvement is the work we do as a fractional CHRO: senior people leadership, part-time, working inside the business rather than presenting to it.