My Story

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"I want to solve people problems in organizations."

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This was a conviction I had since 1997 when I witnessed how badly managed companies affected not just investors but also the family of employees. This conviction, and a curiosity on the executives' decision-making, guided me through my teens.

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I pondered about the nature of organizations, teams, and more fundamentally the minds of people at work. And when the time for college came, I realized that subjects related to humans in organization were an absolute breeze, but unsatisfying. This led me to pursue my doctorate in the organizational sciences covering the fundamental areas of psychology, sociology, philosophy of science, neuroscience, and computational physics in search of answers.

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I learnt far beyond the usual domains. But I was learning the academic "game" and not so much about any real solutions for organizations. My internship at a top global HR consultancy, only showed that the S.E.A. consulting industry was more about selling benchmark data, subscription services, or bidding for government projects. The projects I did on competency models, job architecture, and compiling salary data were fun but still product focused.

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After my doctoral and post-doc days, I joined Korn Ferry Institute as a research staff developing organizational diagnostics and effectiveness tool, reward optimization, and several field surveys. It was a great experience as I had access to a myriad of tools used by consultants and worked out the mechanics behind them. But I was not solving organizational problems.

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After 8 months, I decided to volunteer overseas to seek a different perspective. I chose Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan, for its pristine mountains and the unique mix of Soviet and nomadic culture. I was also the few Singaporeans in the country.

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I was, and still am, a faculty at the American University of Central Asia. I had students who did not have books, students who were KGB-linked, students who's family owns mountains, fellow foreign faculty that may go missing, and several parliamentarians sitting in the cubicle next to mine. I saw that beneath the façade of rule of law, is the reality of power, connections, and the temporal nature of things.

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As an expat, I drove change. I set up the ethics review system for human research, and also started the Organizational Research Institute to provide pro-bono consulting and research services to companies based in the city of Bishkek. I was, in a country where I do not speak the language, but solving organizational problems and educating future managers to solve problems for their organizations.

A less-taken path cannot be summarized in a few paragraphs.​

If you have a real world OD HR problem to solve, drop me a note.