About Swee Hoon Ong

My name is Swee Hoon Ong from iota prime class and I work as a senior organizational development consultant in a multinational organization, Western Digital.

The MS in Organization Development program changed the trajectory of my life in a way that through the programs I learned things that are very important to me. One is being able to engage knowledge by using the brain, the heart, and courage. Combining these three elements will make an OD person bring their whole self to the system so when working with clients it is more effective. The second part is that personally I am originally from Malaysia, and came all the way to the US to learn about the new culture as well as to interact and broaden my perspective with people from different countries which help me to increase my awareness and also that help me to build capabilities in my profession and there has been tremendously helpful. Looking back it has been ten years and now living in US I was just thinking that without the MSOD program I probably wouldn't be where I am today and in terms of my profession, my personal growth, and the number of people that I met throughout the last ten years.

The legacy that I would like to leave behind is be able to make an impact into individuals or small teams or organizations enable them to be more effective when interacting with each other or becoming more high performing. And, another part is also that I want to make sure that any work that I am doing with any organizations people have to be more mindful and come together to appreciate the diversity and to appreciate the differences to make this work place become more beautiful and become better and that helps to create a better work.

In the long run I was just thinking that this field has a lot of room for any individuals of professionals to contribute, to make it more robust.  Thinking about today we have all the differences of technology, we need data, and we also have to make sure that we don't forget the humanistic part of the work in the OD space. But, how do we integrate these three things together to make sure that whenever we move into artificial intelligence or we are data hungry that the human and people connection piece continue to be important. There are certain grounding principals that I think we should continue to make sure that we own so as to bring life to the organizations and that will help them to make a bigger impact and not just about data, not just about charts, and also technology.

So, yeah. So, the MSOD experience has been very rich personally and for me is that one thing that I appreciate the most is I get to meet a lot of amazing kind hearted people and super smart. Collectively because of this space that MSOD program created that connects all the different classes of people together that create the synergy that helps personally that helped me with my individual growth as well as also that collectively as a whole group that we can make a bigger impact to society and also to the world.