Johnson and Johnson a couple of years in different roles, mostly in The US, Europe. Came back to Asia to run our aviation business, but, you know, multiple industries from TV to to financial services and to aviation. And, ultimately, after a number of years doing learning and development for GE and then Johnson and Johnson at the global global level, I decided to set up my own enterprise called Euronomics. And that's grown and, you know, today it's a social enterprise doing a number of things, incubating a number of businesses. And we are all, you know, in Southeast Asia at this point in time.
Yep. That's quick summary. Yeah. No. So I actually came back to Malaysia in '99 to run one of GE's aviation units and then, you know, kinda took on the Asia Pacific role in that in that in that the aviation space.
But, you know, when I then relocated to my next role to Singapore, then to China, and then to Japan, and then to China over the next couple of roles. I've always kind of been fascinated about why they develop you know, the developing country syndrome, right, or the conundrum. Why is it that, you know, they are not so talented in the developing countries, yet when the same talent, they go overseas. Right? When they go to The US, when they go to other countries that are developed, they somehow develop and mature.
Right? And so, you know, I started looking at this and I realized that same thing happens in companies. Why was GE, at least in the nineties and early two thousands, producing such significant amount of talent? So, I mean, you know, any GE executive in the nineties was like gold. Right?
I mean, if you're from GE, you must be some some amazing talent. But that same talent, when they leave GE, they may not be as sterling as they were. And likewise, somebody from another organization that comes into GE suddenly becomes really talented. And I realized there's a system. Right?
There's an ecosystem around it. And so I decided to test this ecosystem and that and and it started more as a so I I joined John so instead of starting a social enterprise, I was too scared. I actually left GE to join Johnson and Johnson as the global the the global talent in in terms of in in a role that's like a global talent role, taking care of their global talent. And, you know, while I was there, what I started to experiment, and so I set up a company called Neuronomics. And the idea of it was to to say, if I take underprivileged kids or kids that are really, really behind, you know, in certain areas, very remote areas in Malaysia, I took them, I put them in a in a one week camp and I brought my gym ex my managers that I knew, I said volunteer, take a week off, come and volunteer at this camp and the j and j managers and they would come in and they would spend time with this kid.
And then, you know, allow that relationship just to to and this started somewhere in 02/2005, '2 thousand '6. Right? And over three, four years, I was noticing that, hey, these kids that came for our camp somehow had different trajectories because they met GE people, because they met people that open their mindset to bigger possibilities, then also because they've gained some confidence doing projects and stuff, they started go to university and colleges. Right? And then not only that, they started to get sponsored by these people they've met.
Right? Because now they've got a relationship and they say, hey, I I wanna go college but no money. Oh, no problem. We'll help you out, you know, and so on and so forth. And you started to see the change of a little bit, not just them but change, but their entire village started to change.
Right? Because they may come from a remote village and the village say, hey, my cousin is now in this college or my cousin is now interning in GE and this and that because they they started getting internships in GE and and and J and J and a couple other things. Right? So as we started to see that change, was like, hey. This is worth investing in.
And so I set up a company, usually called Neuronomics, and I said, look. I'm just gonna continue in J and J, but I'm gonna put money in and hire a few people to make this camps something that's a constant basis. Now fortunately or unfortunate, I don't know. Hard to say. But one one of my just one of the the folks that I was hoping, was a CEO of a big media company called the Star Media Group.
And he had called me in because he said, hey, you know, you have got financial services and media background. Can you can you come and spend once a week on a Saturday, have coffee with me and just give me some advice on how to transform this this giant, right, I mean, this media company. That's why I do that more of a volunteer kind of fun basis. And, you know, he kinda said, hey, you have this this entity that you're doing it. Why don't I invest in it or start investing it?
And you got money, why don't you come in full time? You know, you do some consulting work for us and on the side, you run whatever you wanna run to save the world, you know, or save Malaysia. Right? And that's kinda how it happened because when he put in some seed money in there, you know, I took the brave decision to say, okay, there's a bit of money there. I leave my job.
And then one thing led to another. I mean, unfortunately for us also, within a couple of months, he actually had to vacate his position. There was a change in the in the hierarchy and he lost that role as the CEO or the executive deputy chair. And new guy came in and said, what's this? No.
We're not doing any consulting with you and we're not doing this. And I think we were already owned by that company and what happened is we had to build a sort of a sustainable business model. And this is where I started to do some consulting, know, our our learning and development arm started to to mushroom where I would do the work. And as that grew, I had more people to take that work and drive it, which is how we ended up with, you know, a social a huge community arm, which we still have called MAD or Map Map Movement. We also have a very strong business arm that does learning and development and others called LeaderNomics Services.
And today, we've established a third arm, which is really incubators. How do we solve problems in the community and make it sustainable, meaning have a business model to it that that that is profitable, which is how we entered cybersecurity and and HR tech and generative AI now with NVIDIA and a number of other things that we've got different partnerships with. So that's kind of the thesis of how I accidentally became an entrepreneur.
