An Executive Education Success Story from Singapore

Senior leaders in the FMCG sector are operating in an environment defined by speed, complexity, and constant trade-offs. Growth ambitions must be balanced with operational discipline, digital transformation, and rising expectations around sustainability—all while maintaining alignment across diverse leadership teams.

As part of an executive education programme in Singapore, a regional FMCG organisation partnered with AEQLIA to strengthen strategic leadership capability across its senior management cohort.

The ambition was not to introduce new frameworks, but to create a shared leadership experience that would sharpen decision-making, alignment, and execution at the enterprise level.

The Leadership Challenge

The organisation was navigating several interconnected challenges:

• Expansion into new and highly competitive markets

• Pressure to deliver short-term performance while building long-term resilience

• Shifting towards more digital, agile, and innovation-driven ways of working

• Embedding sustainability considerations into core business decisions

• Ensuring stronger alignment and collaboration across the leadership team

While these themes were familiar, leaders needed a way to experience the trade-offs collectively, rather than discuss them in isolation.

The Learning Approach

AEQLIA designed an integrated learning experience within the executive education programme, combining facilitated reflection with an immersive, team-based decision environment.

Participants worked as a leadership team in a simulated business context, where they were required to:

• Make strategic choices under uncertainty and time pressure

• Prioritise competing business objectives

• Navigate growth, efficiency, innovation, and sustainability tensions

• Lead through ambiguity while maintaining alignment and trust

The experience created space for leaders to test assumptions, challenge one another, and see the consequences of their decisions unfold in real time.

What Leaders Experienced

The simulation-based module quickly shifted the dynamic from theoretical discussion to active leadership practice.

Participants reported that the experience:

• Made strategic complexity tangible and visible

• Highlighted the impact of leadership behaviours on outcomes

• Surfaced differences in priorities, risk appetite, and decision styles

• Strengthened collective ownership of decisions and results

The relevance of the experience was reflected in a 97% participant satisfaction rate, underscoring its impact within the executive education journey.

The Impact

By the end of the programme, leaders walked away with:

• A clearer, shared understanding of strategic priorities and trade-offs

• Stronger alignment on how to lead growth and transformation responsibly

• Increased confidence in navigating complexity as a leadership team

• Practical insights to apply directly back in their roles

The programme reinforced that effective executive education is not about more content, but about better experiences—ones that enable leaders to think, decide, and reflect together.

A Platform for Executive Learning

This engagement demonstrates how immersive, experience-led learning can elevate executive education—helping senior leaders build the capabilities required to lead in complex, fast-evolving FMCG environments.