The 2026 Top Consultants: Siddharth Pathak

What would you say has been the biggest factor in your success so far?

Being brilliantly practical. That phrase has become a personal mantra, but it captures something I genuinely believe: the only metric that matters in consulting is whether the strategy actually works on the ground. Early on, I noticed that business challenges in Asia are almost never single-lever problems. You can have the best digital strategy in the room, but if you haven't secured buy-in from a traditional leadership team – or if you haven't thought through how a warehouse operator in Jakarta will actually use the new system – it falls apart. Real transformation requires synchronizing technology, people, and processes. Miss one, and the whole thing stalls. This shaped how I work. I stay through execution. I don't hand over a deck and move on. When we transformed a leading ASEAN company from a legacy brick-and-mortar business into a digital leader, the strategy was maybe 30% of the effort. The other 70% was change management – navigating cultural resistance, retraining teams, making sure the new ways of working actually stuck.

The other factor is range. Seventeen years across six APAC markets teaches you that what works in Japan's mature retail sector will fail spectacularly in Indonesia's fragmented distribution landscape. My luxury beauty work with LUXASIA came down to advising brands on shade ranges for South Asian and Southeast Asian skin tones – a product-level decision no global headquarters would have flagged, but one that directly determined market success. That pattern recognition can only be built over time.

What do you enjoy most about your career in the consulting industry?

The learning never stops. That sounds like a cliché, but in the consumer and retail space across Asia-Pacific, it's literally true. The landscape shifts constantly – the rise of the "glocal" consumer, the disruption of travel retail as airport dwell times collapse, food services reinventing themselves post-COVID. There is always something new to decode. What I find most rewarding is the transition from discussion to execution. There is a phase in every engagement I privately think of as "the fancy part" – the presentations, the consumer surveys, the strategy sessions. That part is interesting. But the real satisfaction comes from what happens next: when strategy meets reality. Watching four smaller distributors merge to become a leading and thriving digitally first Singaporean distribution is what gives satisfaction. Consulting at its best puts you at the intersection of industries and cultures, and the lessons transfer in ways you don't expect. Something I learned about luxury beauty in India informed how we thought about digital loyalty in Singapore. I'm also grateful that Kearney has given me space to pursue what matters beyond commercial work. IGNITE Thailand – our community for aspiring women leaders – adds a layer of purpose that keeps me energized. Seeing a mentee step into a leadership role she didn't think was possible – that's a different kind of reward.

What is your proudest achievement to date?

Two things, and I'm proud for very different reasons. The first is the digital transformation of a leading ASEAN company. Not because it was the biggest engagement, but because it was the toughest. The client was a traditional brick-and-mortar business. Legacy culture, legacy systems, and a deep institutional hesitancy toward change. They had an ambitious leader with a progressive vision, but the gap between that vision and operational reality was vast. This was not a technology problem – it was a people problem. I led a team through an intensive change management program to put data and AI to work across the organization. We didn't just deliver a strategy and leave. We stayed until the transformation took hold – until the new processes were embedded, the teams were retrained, and the metrics showed it was working. Today, that company is recognized as a digital leader in its market. That outcome still means a lot to me because it validated something I believe: even the most traditional organizations can leapfrog their competition when you get the technology-and-people equation right.

The second is IGNITE Thailand. When we launched alongside Egon Zehnder, we were responding to a specific problem: only 19% of board seats in Thailand are held by women. Closing our inaugural session at The Ritz-Carlton Bangkok – with over 30 mentors and mentees from CP Group, Central Group, Microsoft, and Siam Commercial Bank in the room – felt like a tangible step and an actual beginning to something powerful.

What's the best advice you've ever been given?

"Solve for the problem, not for the trend." A mentor told me that early in my career, and it stuck. At the time, I was tempted to recommend the most innovative solution because that's what clients expected. Shiny and new sells well in a boardroom. But he pointed out something that has proved true over and over: building a solution to a problem you don't fully understand will always lead to failure. This became the foundation of how I work. Digital transformation does not end when a system goes live. It ends when the change management metrics have been hit and new processes are part of how the organization operates. I've seen too many companies rush into technology adoption because a competitor did it or a board member read an article about it. That's not strategy – that's FOMO. I apply this constantly when advising on generative AI. The question I always ask is: what specific bottleneck are we solving? If the answer is vague, we're not ready. If it's precise – say, reducing time-to-insight on consumer data across three markets – then we move fast. The reason that advice has endured is because it's not really about technology. It's about discipline. The most valuable thing I do for clients is often telling them what not to do. That takes a willingness to slow a boardroom down when everyone else is accelerating. But it's why relationships last 8, 10, and 17 years. Trust compounds when you're consistently right about what matters.

What does this recognition mean to you?

It's an endorsement of the work we've done across Asia-Pacific, and I say "we" deliberately. Whatever I've achieved is the result of teams I've been fortunate to lead at Kearney and clients who were willing to take the harder path to real transformation. On a personal level, this validates something I've spent 17 years building: the conviction that Asia-Pacific requires its own playbook. The "glocal" framework, the GRDI work, the insistence on staying through execution – all of it traces back to understanding that this region's complexity is the point, not the obstacle.

This recognition also comes at a time when consulting is rightly being asked to show its impact. Our practice has delivered double-digit growth across six APAC markets over four years. That's the result of clients trusting us to do the hard work and our teams delivering on it. And if this recognition encourages one more organization to invest in something like IGNITE – to look beyond commercial metrics and build leadership pipelines for the women who will run this region's companies in 20 years – then it will have been worth far more than any award. On a personal front, being a trusted advisor across APAC requires personal sacrifices. It will be a proud moment for the family that has stood by and supported this passion and purpose to see the efforts being recognized.