When Ferdinand Sia was based in East Asia, a working day could begin with a call to Sydney. It moved through Southeast Asia, then India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. Europe or Turkey came next. Washington often called in the evening.
“There was rarely a neat boundary around the working day,” he says.
That schedule was the visible cost of a harder job: getting people to move together when none of them reported to him.
A global business leader, Sia previously served as CFO and Managing Director of Business Development at EEI Corporation, led the Philippines’ first Oracle Cloud ERP implementation, and completed Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management Program. His years in international development include roles at the International Finance Corporation (IFC), part of the World Bank Group, and the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF).
Sia worked alongside governments, private companies, and development institutions, each with its own mandate. At one point his work covered more than 15 countries across East Asia and South Asia, with several projects running at once.
His word for the job is bridging.
Authority without the org chart
Leading without direct authority, Sia says, “means giving people a reason to move toward a shared goal when they have their own responsibilities, priorities, and reporting lines.” It starts with understanding what matters to each institution. Then the purpose has to be clear, and the follow-through consistent enough that people commit their time.
Global standards gave his projects a framework. Local colleagues knew the counterparts and the practical ways of getting things done. “My role was to connect those perspectives and ensure that experience from the field informed decisions at the regional and global levels,” he says. The same logic ran through his work on a global portfolio management platform.
Communication did most of the lifting: regular conversations, shared project information, and travel. Face-to-face meetings, he says, settled issues that were harder to resolve remotely.
The pace asked for discipline. Sia planned days and weeks ahead, grouped similar tasks, and built meetings and travel around specific agendas. For recurring work such as project reviews, he developed rules of thumb so routine decisions did not eat disproportionate attention.
Trust as a track record
“Trust grows when people see that you deliver consistently, take their concerns seriously, and remain engaged when the work becomes difficult,” Sia says.
He starts by learning the pressures other people carry. A colleague may back the objective and still face constraints no one can see from outside.
Candor matters most when progress disappoints. “People need an accurate picture to make decisions,” he says. A hard conversation can build trust if you stay involved in the fix.
He reads the evidence in what colleagues ask of him next. At IFC, Sia started with East Asia and was later asked to take on South Asia. He was then asked to spearhead global initiatives, including new product development, and to introduce analytical work for the global strategy department, starting with financial inclusion in the Solomon Islands.
He does not treat that as a reward. “Each invitation also raised the expectations,” he says. More people were relying on his judgment.
When the plan meets the ground
Ambitious goals have to pass through real institutions. Sia says the translation usually breaks when the assumptions behind a project stop matching the conditions where it is carried out. Priorities shift. An approach that looked sound at the start proves hard to execute.
His first step is to make the gap visible, through direct conversations with the stakeholders involved. Is the commitment to the objective still there? What has changed? What is blocking progress? What would it take to move forward? “These discussions can be uncomfortable,” he says, “but they help establish a shared understanding of the problem.”
The response then has to be practical: more resources, renewed alignment, or a change in design or scope. “I have learned to act proactively once it becomes clear that the original approach is unlikely to achieve its objectives,” he says.
The outcome he values most is a public policy that keeps shaping decisions long after the project has ended. He is also drawn to bringing new ideas into development work, such as business analytics applied to programs and investments. The harder part is turning the idea into something institutions can execute and sustain.
Different definitions of success
Sia begins by asking each stakeholder to spell out what success means to them. What problem are they solving? What outcome matters to their institution? What assumptions and constraints sit behind their decisions?
The answers rarely match. A government body may care about public access. A private company needs a commercially viable proposition. A development institution may focus on inclusion and lasting impact. “People can agree on the broad purpose of a project while expecting very different things from it,” he says.
Frequent engagement brings those differences out early. Sia looks for the concern behind each position, then moves toward what can be agreed, who will do what, and what stays open. His goal is modest and specific: “enough agreement on purpose, responsibilities, and tradeoffs to make progress.” Stakeholders can value different outcomes and still work together.
The part curricula skip
Asked what he wishes more global leaders understood, Sia does not point to a framework. He points to the time it takes to bridge perspectives before anyone can move.
“It is easy to conclude that someone’s approach is less appealing when it is simply different from what you would do,” he says. The task is to understand what sits behind the difference: the pressures, the experience, the constraints. That does not make every approach equally sound. It means understanding the reasoning before judging it, and making your own clear enough to examine.
It also means being willing to change your mind. “Sometimes you also must reconsider your own,” Sia says.
Experience across countries widens the set of ideas a leader can draw on. Their value, he says, depends on a shared understanding with the people who must act on them. “Expertise gives you something to contribute; communication, diplomacy, and trust help turn that contribution into collective action.”
The Washington call still came in the evening. By then, the day had already gone to the same task, one time zone at a time.
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