By: Andy Wu | Born Global Research Fellow
June 10, 2025
When Kenneth Tan, CEO of a global workforce strategy firm Sparkd Partners, reflects on his 25 years of leading operations and supply chains on a global scale, he doesn’t start with technology or business school case studies. Instead, he begins with people and how they respond when everything goes haywire. Growing up, he learned early the value of resilience and hard work. These roots and morals shape how he approaches challenges today.
“Flexibility, resilience, and adaptability are what are going to be important,” Tan says. He singles out the COVID pandemic as the most recent example of why these qualities matter. “If that country shuts down, like what happened during COVID, then you could not get any material out, right?” Sparks Partners specializes in helping organizations build these key capabilities, and the lesson to take away is simple: “You get comfortable with one supplier that we’re working with, and they’re great, and you forget that… sometimes you need the other supplier or two other suppliers in different parts of the world to mitigate that risk.”
Additionally, Tan emphasizes that success isn’t just about processes, but more about the mindset. “That mindset puts you in a position that, ‘Oh, this just happened. How do I make sure I problem-solve for this situation?” Sparks Partners aims to build cultures where leaders and teams in all industries are “always ready to respond.” The importance of bouncing back from setbacks is almost always at the forefront of his team’s efforts, adding, “It has a lot to do with company culture, leadership engagement, constant training, and challenges… thereby you create a culture of, ‘Oh, we’re always ready to respond.’”
From the education standpoint, Tan insists that “What schools do well today is delivering curriculum,” but there is somewhat of a gap or learning curve as “what you had learned [in school] may or may not be 100% overlap and relevant [in the workforce].” Tan also challenges the conventional idea of career progression: “A lot of people come to the workforce thinking that if I do a good job and do it well, I should get promoted and should get my raise. But sometimes that does not… work out.” He explains that oftentimes, success in the corporate ladder and the workforce is more reliant on relationships, trust, and willingness to grow. “It’s also about, can the company trust you to handle more responsibilities. Are you willing to stretch yourself more than what is asked of you?”
Another interesting perspective that Tan believes is that education should be way more practical and longer. “Maybe it’s a longer education time. You take longer to earn your degree. But you come out of there with, you know, four or five different types of working experience in different industries.” He is a strong advocate for starting as early as “high school” and being able to go and work outside of the school setting. This way, students are exposed to how the working world revolves, minimizing the awkward phase of job training, professional skills, and the gap between higher education and the workforce.
Tan ultimately credits his success to the characteristics of resilience and access to mentorship. “I was the beneficiary of some really good mentors… They helped me rationalize the thoughts in my mind to gain clarity.” Once you establish a strong base of connections and relationships, he says that resilience is “probably the single most important skill” — being “unwavering, no matter what the negative circumstance is.” His guiding motto from Rocky Balboa sums it up: “It’s not about how hard you get hit, but how many times you can get hit and keep moving forward.”