In January 2017, Surbana Jurong Private Limited, a wholly-owned infrastructure consultancy of Singapore's Temasek Holdings, came under the spotlight for terminating 54 of its Singapore-based employees. Surbana Jurong said this was part of a performance review. However, the mass termination raised concerns that the company was retrenching workers under the banner of poor performance so that it wouldn't have to pay additional compensation to its former employees. According to Surbana Jurong, the mass termination was not a retrenchment exercise, but "rather, a small number of poor performers were communicated with and released." The termination episode drew negative reaction from the trade unions and the public, an open rebuke from the Manpower Minister, and a subsequent public commitment from Surbana Jurong to improve its performance management processes. What lessons could Surbana Jurong draw from this episode?

Launched in 2012, Grab began in Malaysia as a third-party e-hailing taxi dispatching mobile application. The company expanded at a remarkable speed and by 2015, the app had been downloaded more than 4.4 million times, averaging seven bookings per second. A year later the app had over 13 million downloads, serving 30 cities across six countries in Southeast Asia. The app's functionality too had expanded to include an array of locally suited transportation booking options beyond just taxi services, such as car-pooling, ride-sharing, private vehicle hire and more. Valued at about US$1.5 billion in 2016, Grab was one of Asia's most successful start-ups. The company's business model was aligned with its social mission to improve the safety and accessibility of transportation, along with improving the lives of its passengers, drivers and the community. End-users benefited through improved transportation options, where safety, certainty and speed were guiding principles of the company. However, long-term success was far from guaranteed. Technological and social change was always afoot. The sharing economy, of which Grab was a part, was hyper-local, social and mobile - and above all - extremely competitive. Uber, its main rival, was a larger, technologically savvy global player offering nearly identical services in the region. However, Grab's local roots could prove to be a competitive advantage in navigating Southeast Asia's many complicated and highly fragmented markets, which faced significant regulatory uncertainty in the on-demand transportation industry.