For decades, power lived in corner offices and Western capitals. Now it belongs to the creators, designers, and entrepreneurs shaping culture through depth rather than infrastructure. The shift is global, but Asia-Pacific sits at its epicentre, where the next generation of influential leaders is proving intentionality trumps scale every time.
For most of modern history, power was borrowed. You acquired it from the institution stamped on your business card, the skyline headquarters, the corner-office fantasy, the global headcount, or the acronyms orbiting your name like satellites. That was the world we all knew. Authority lived in Western capitals, “scale” was its currency, and “size” equalled credibility.
But that centre of gravity is cracking open. Intentionality is now outpacing scale, faster and sharper, and with far more cultural intelligence. The old playbook of “bigger is better” is quietly being replaced with “sharper wins every time,” and the people who haven’t noticed are still busy polishing their LinkedIn titles. A seismic shift, both democratised and geographical, is rewriting the rules of influence. Growth is no longer about sprawling into as many markets as humanly possible. It’s about depth, clarity, and cultural impact. And increasingly, the roots of this new power are being planted in Asia-Pacific.
Growing up in a hard-working migrant household, I’d moved to more than a dozen cities before the age of 11 and found myself obsessed with culture. Not the jargon version we know today, but the real circuitry of it, long before I had language for what I was seeing and doing. I was obsessed with understanding how ideas form. How they travel. How they materialise in people and places. How they shape everything from food to sport and the way people move through a 1,200-person rural Australian town versus a city of six million in Southern India. It wasn’t a hobby, it wasn’t me trying to be cool. It was a survival tactic. And that early immersion shaped everything that came after. It’s the lens that has guided a two-decade career built on curiousity across multiple continents and is a lens that now sits, intentionally focused on APAC.
Long before culture became the status quo or something executives pretended to understand on stage at tech conferences, the signals were already there, subtle but impossible to ignore. We all remember the rise of the celebrity chef era in the 2000s, when chefs suddenly began holding the kind of cultural currency previously reserved for multinational brands. It then shifted gears for designers, musicians, and thinkers to quietly reshape global aesthetics, from Bijoy Jain’s handcrafted architectural influence redefining luxury to Kerry Hill’s modern Australian design language becoming the visual blueprint for resorts across Asia. And most recently, we entered an era where emerging markets are no longer waiting for culture to be exported to them. They’re exporting it out. K-Pop didn’t just arrive; it detonated. India’s contemporary design wave didn’t just follow global taste; it redirected it. The fact is these signals aren’t subtle anymore. They’re seismic.
Today’s most culturally influential figures aren’t CEOs or politicians. They’re chefs, creators, designers, sustainability entrepreneurs, musicians, and athletes shaping public imagination. People who move culture not by the size of their organisation, but by the depth of their ability to connect. And the appetite for cultural power is accelerating, which shouldn’t surprise anyone paying attention. Culture has this power because it helps people make sense of a world where traditional institutions feel less relevant. People aren’t just buying into culture to seem current. They’re turning to it as a form of navigation. Cultural figures feel human, values-driven, and future-orientated, offering cues on how to live and where to belong. In a time of uncertainty, culture isn’t just about being cool; it’s about finding grounding and direction.
But why the obsession? Because the cultural barometers keep multiplying. Lists like the Australian Financial Review‘s 10 Most Culturally Powerful People, the TIME100, the Dazed100, and GQ‘s Heroes rankings all point to the same truth. Influence sits firmly with individuals.
When the same names rise across these indices, it’s not a coincidence. It’s a recalibration. These are people shaping taste, language, aspiration, and identity through intimacy, not infrastructure, but to what point does it shift from culture to the commerce of selling publications? Regardless, their ascent makes one thing obvious. Cultural relevance is the new currency, and real influence is measured by how powerfully you can shape how people live, speak, create, consume, and ultimately, see themselves.
If the cultural indicators weren’t enough, economics has joined the chorus. The creator economy is already a $250 billion force and is set to almost double, not because it’s cute or trendy, but because individuals now command the kind of influence institutions once monopolised. And by 2027, more than half of the US workforce could be freelance, independent, values-led, and profoundly uninterested in old corporate hierarchies. Even corporations are catching on. PayPal recently advertising for a Head of CEO Content wasn’t a gimmick or merely a viral LinkedIn post. It was a strategic confession that audiences trust people more than brands. The messenger is now as important as the message.
The bigger, more interesting story, however, is what this shift means for APAC. Because this isn’t just a global trend. It’s a structural realignment that disproportionately favours the region. APAC is home to the most digitally engaged populations on earth, the fastest-growing creative economies, and a generation that leapfrogged legacy systems entirely. It’s where the largest generational wealth transfer in modern history is underway. And in a region moving this quickly, individuals aren’t competing with old power structures. They’re building new ones.
Take Renyung Ho, heiress to Banyan Tree Hotels & Resorts and now deputy CEO of the organisation her parents founded, but with a modern mandate. Ho isn’t here simply to inherit a legacy; she’s here to evolve it. A next-generation entrepreneur, impact investor, humanitarian, and writer, she is deeply serious about building a regenerative business, not as a marketing slogan, but as a long-term operating system. Her work sits at the intersection of sustainability, experience design, and brand development, quietly reshaping what a global hospitality leader from Asia can look like.
Or, on the flipside within a more corporate landscape, consider Samya Deb, Google’s Head of Creative for APAC, a cultural architect inside one of the world’s largest tech companies. Deb has spent more than two decades leading creative studios known for strategic clarity, disruptive ideas, and a level of craft that actually moves culture rather than just commenting on it. He built and scaled Airbnb’s Creative Studios in Singapore and Shanghai before taking the helm of YouTube’s Asia-Pacific Brand Creative Studio, where he collaborates with the kind of purpose-driven founders and creators ambitious enough to shape cultural conversation for generations to come. In a region as diverse and fast-moving as APAC, he’s become one of the quiet power players defining how stories travel and for whom they’re told.
This is the APAC equation in motion. Influence doesn’t scale horizontally here. It deepens vertically. The next wave of growth belongs to those who prioritise cultural intelligence, regional nuance, and careful curation. The ones who understand that Asia isn’t a market. It’s a mosaic. Success here isn’t earned through scale; it’s earned through sensitivity.
For decades, “going global” meant expanding into the US or Europe. Asia-Pacific was treated as the operational stepchild, the offshore hub, the back office, the afterthought. You get the gist. A mistake rooted less in strategy and more in outdated assumptions.
That era is over. The world’s cultural and commercial gravity is shifting eastward, and Asia is now the world’s economic engine. Success in the region demands cultural fluency, local trust, and values-led storytelling because what resonates in Tokyo will not resonate in Jakarta, and what works in Mumbai certainly won’t land in Bangkok. Understanding Asia requires proximity. Nuance. A willingness to listen rather than project. Winning here has nothing to do with footprint and everything to do with fluency. And the world is finally starting to take notice. Pharrell’s Louis Vuitton collaboration with A.R. Rahman. LVMH’s investment in Dishoom. Sabyasachi’s rise as a global luxury force.
Scale is out. Intentionality is in. And nowhere is that more obvious than in Asia-Pacific. For decades, the region was framed as the operational back office of the world, a place for execution, not origin. Today, that myth has collapsed. APAC isn’t waiting for influence to trickle down from the West; it’s generating it, exporting it, and redefining what global power looks like. If the last century belonged to institutions, the next will belong to individuals, and many of the most influential of them will come from APAC. Because this region rewards those who listen before they build, who understand the mosaic before they map the market, and who see culture not as an accessory but as the operating system.
The world’s cultural engine has already shifted eastward, quietly at first, now unmistakably. The only question left is this. Who’s prepared to shift with it? The future of influence will be written by those who go deep, who move with intention, and who recognise Asia not as the periphery, but as centre stage.
And APAC? It got the memo first.
Natasha Menon-Verheul is the founder of Menon Curatorial, an Asia-Pacific focused advisory specialising in leadership development, strategic positioning, and capital raising for culturally influential leaders across the region.
