Poesy truly a great inspiration

A true-blue KL-ite who has become an international personality is now seeking to mentor the younger generation.

SHE has been a child TV star, a model, an almost singing artiste and had a couple of multi-millionaire boyfriends to boot but yet Poesy Liang has pushed everything aside to become a mentor and a game changer.

This Imbi girl, who was raised in the heart of Kuala Lumpur, is quite a socialite who counts many rich and famous as her close personal friends. In fact, on the eve of my interview with her, Poesy had Isabella Soliano over to help her clean her house after a leaking roof episode. (Isabella, a popular jazz singer, is the daughter of the late Alfonso Soliano who was a well-known musician and composer in the 1950s and 60s.)

But yet, I had never heard of Poesy until about a week ago although she looked familiar. She was the face of the Levis jeans adverts over 20 years ago when she was just 14 years old. She also hosted RIM Chart Show in 1998 on ntv7.

But for the life of me, I did not know who she was and what she had done. A quick research on the Internet showed that there has been quite a bit written about her and she does have thousands of friends on Facebook.

She has lived a life that would fill several lifetimes but Poesy has had several life-changing moments that act as milestones which have kept her reinventing herself.

Her health issues, immature decisions, rich boyfriends and artistic capabilities have turned this 37-year-old woman from a spoilt brat into a person who is aware of her surroundings and the need to play an active role to help shape the world.



One cannot help but admire Poesy’s gumption after hearing of her health problems – tumours grew in her spinal cord and she was left paralysed after two surgeries. She has been having tumour growth since 1992 when she was at the height of her popularity at age 17.

Then within a year she learnt to walk again but “I walk visually because I have no more feelings in my legs.”

But it all came crashing down when in 2003 she needed another surgery for the same problem.

“I had to learn to walk all over again. The second time wasn’t any easier but I was determined to do it,” said Poesy.

Three years later she had to go to Stanford University for a “clean-up surgery” to tackle the rest of her spinal tumours. She was treated by the inventor of Cyberknife surgery, neurosurgeon Dr John R. Adler using that very technology. It cost US$80,000 (RM253,000) and before she could raise enough money for the treatment, Poesy broke up with her rich boyfriend “because I did not want him to think that I was sticking to him just for the money”.

“I am grateful for the assistance he and his family gave me but I needed to do this on my own.”

Poesy did not come from a rich family but it was one of the pioneers of Jalan Imbi back in the 1960s. She still lives in her family home which she has also turned into her art studio.

On Aug 30, 2007, Poesy set up the Helping Angels movement — an NGO with a loose connection of volunteers held together through a Facebook page — to recruit volunteers to do welfare work.

“There are four exclusive rules in Helping Angels — no involvement in fund-raising or collection of donations, no commercial marketing activities, no political rallying activities and no religious evangelism.

“All activities are funded privately, to offer opportunities for volunteers to use their ability and time to help others,” she said.

The phrase “random act of kindness” is repeatedly used by Poesy during our interview and she defined it as “the donation of time and effort, with less emphasis on material and money charity.”

In five years, Poesy’s movement, which now has over 2,200 members, has spread from Malaysia to Indonesia, Thailand, Taiwan, the US, Europe, Africa and Hong Kong.

At home, Poesy and her fellow volunteers have started Thursday Tutoring — a programme to tutor children at various shelter homes around the Klang Valley.

“Helping Angels travel with me. Everywhere I go I try to do a random act of kindness. Like when I was in Senegal, I bought small boxes of colour pencils and pieces of paper and gave it to the kids I met in a poor area.

“One of the mothers asked me why was I doing this crazy thing and I told her that who knows maybe from all the kids who got the colour pencils, one of them may turn out to be a great artist,” Poesy said as a way to explain the Helping Angels movement.

Her next project is called the Green Humanity for the Environment.

“We want to show that there cannot be compassion, kindness and empathy towards humanity without showing compassion, kindness and empathy towards Mother Earth.

“We will be coming up with Random Acts of Kindness towards Mother Earth,” said Poesy, who points out that all these projects come from other members of Helping Angels.

Asked about today’s youth, Poesy said she enjoyed mentoring them because “the youth of today are leaders of tomorrow and I definitely want to change the world.”

There is a real Asian drama series to rival the best Korean soap opera to be gotten from Poesy’s life and knowing her, she will probably want a famous actress to play the lead role.

Why not? She is an inspiration.

WHY NOT? By WONG SAI WAN saiwan@thestar.com.my

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Poesy Liang « Mentorship : Do Something Good

How To Transform Your Industry

Most entrepreneurs don’t spend enough time trying to come up with radically new products.

Why? Because they don’t think they can.

They believe that because they’re in an old, conservative industry, they have no chance of coming up with anything new and different.

They feel that everything has been invented. That there’s no new way to do business or design a product or service.

There’s a good reason they think this: in many industries there has indeed been very little change. But just because the industry hasn’t changed, it doesn’t mean it can’t.

And those that have the courage to come up with revolutionary new products are often rewarded with millions in additional profits for their efforts.

Here is a new example of just such a breakthrough.

You couldn’t get a more boring, staid industry than the envelope business. There’s basically been no change in the design of an envelope for 80 years!

But suddenly along comes Flavorlopes: fruit flavored envelopes!

They solve a real problem – people hate licking envelopes. Now with Flavorlopes you can enjoy licking envelopes with the following flavors: Apple. Cherry, Grape, Orange and Strawberry.

Bang. Just like that, an industry is changed.

Now I’m the first to admit this is not a product breakthrough of the magnitude of the personal computer or the disposable pen. But hey, it’s not a bad effort for the envelope business.

Will people buy them? Of course they will. Is the company that makes them likely to grow a lot in the next 3 years as a result of their originality? You bet. And they deserve to, because unlike the other thousand envelope companies in the world they showed real guts and creativity.

Who dares wins.

How about you? How is your new product creation going? Has it been years since you came up with anything novel for your industry?

Well maybe today is a good time to start. Why not allocate just 15 minutes a day for concocting new product ideas.

Heck, it’s only 15 minutes out of the 600 or so you work every day. Not much at all, but it may just change your industry.

You may not be in the envelope business. But you may end up licking your competition.

Siimon Reynolds, Forbes Contributor

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British rivate banks have failed - need a public solution

Private banks have failed – we need a public solution

The Barclays scandal has underlined the City's unmuzzled power. But it also offers a chance to take democratic control

Bob Diamond, who resigned as chief executive of Barclys on Tuesday, is fighting for a payoff of over £20m. Photograph: Dylan Martinez/REUTERS

The greatest danger of the rate-fixing scandal now engulfing the City of London is that it will be managed and defused in the usual way, and nothing will really change. Tuesday's forced resignation of Bob Diamond, the Barclays chief executive, follows well-worn procedures for dealing with crises that potentially threaten those in power: denounce the worst offenders, let a few symbolic heads roll, set up an inquiry under a safe pair of hands, and tweak the regulations to prevent a repetition of the most egregious misdemeanours.

That's been the pattern of the past few years as Britain's establishment has lurched from the disaster of the Iraq war to the disgrace of parliamentary expense fiddling and media phone-hacking (though in the case of Iraq, the only heads to roll were BBC executives and an army corporal). As for the banks that triggered the greatest economic crisis for 80 years, they have been bailed out and featherbedded, with only the loss of the odd sacrificial City baron to show for their reckless mayhem.

But we can't afford to allow such political dereliction again. The racket revealed around the rigging of the crucial Libor inter-bank interest rate – affecting $500tn worth of contracts, financial instruments, mortgages and loans – has underlined the scale of corruption at the heart of the financial system. It follows the exposure of the mis-selling of dodgy derivatives and payment protection insurance, voracious tax avoidance and last month's breakdown of the RBS-NatWest basic payments system.

It's already clear that the rate rigging, which depends on collusion, goes far beyond Barclays, and indeed the City of London. This is one of multiple scams that have become endemic in a disastrously deregulated system with inbuilt incentives for cartels to manipulate the core price of finance. Not only that, but the rigging has been public for years – it was first reported in 2008 – and no action has been taken until now.

That echoes the phone-hacking scandal, which erupted eight years after Rebekah Brooks told parliament News International was bribing the police and her admission was entirely ignored. On Tuesday Barclays sought to implicate Whitehall officials in its rate-rigging in 2008, and an angry Diamond, fighting for a payoff of over £20m, can be expected to go further when he appears before the Commons on Wednesday.

As they did with the Murdoch press, politicians who have abased themselves before the financial elite are now denouncing corrupt bankers and each other for failing to bring them to heel. David Cameron, whose party relies on City donors for more than half its income, wants a narrowly Libor-focused parliamentary inquiry to avoid the bigger picture and focus blame on New Labour's enthusiasm for "light touch regulation" in the runup to the crash.

Ed Miliband is rightly pressing for a much broader, Leveson-style public inquiry into the entire banking system. But the reality is that the whole political class embraced deregulated finance in the boom years. While Tony Blair and Gordon Brown pampered the banks, George Osborne and the Conservatives were demanding still less regulation, and even the Liberal Democrat Vince Cable, now the bankers' scourge, endorsed a financial "light touch".

This is yet another disgrace for the country's governing elites. The new revelation of corruption comes after the exposure of the deception of the Iraq war, fraud in parliament and the police, the criminality of a media mafia and the devastating failure of the banks four years ago. It could of course have happened only in a private-dominated financial sector, and makes a nonsense of the bankrupt free-market ideology that still holds sway in public life.

Political and business powerbrokers insist it's all a problem of leadership, bad apples and a culture that has gone awry. But such cultures are generated by structures and systems – and in the case of the City, deregulated short-term profit maximisation has as good as required them. It's certainly necessary to have a clearout of City bosses, prosecutions and wide-ranging inquiries, but only far-reaching change will clear this cesspit.

The financial system has already failed at huge economic and social cost. It has been shown to be corrupt, incompetent, rapacious and economically destructive. The City's claims to be an indispensable jobs and tax engine for the British economy are nonsense: the bailout costs of 2008-9 dwarfed the financial tax revenues of the boom years, which were below those of manufacturing even at their peak.

In fact, the banks are pumped up with state subsidies and liquidity that they are still failing to pass on in productive lending five years into the crisis. A crucial part of the explanation is the unmuzzled political and economic power of the City: its colonisation of Whitehall and public life, effective grip on its own regulation, revolving-door pull on politicians and civil servants, and purchase of political parties. Finance has usurped democracy.

The crash of 2008 offered a huge opportunity to break that grip and reform the financial system. It was lost. The system was left as good as intact, and even the part-nationalised banks, RBS and Lloyds, have since been run at arm's length to fatten them up as quickly as possible for re-privatisation (savage RBS cost-cutting lies behind its humiliating performance last month), instead of as motors of investment and recovery.

The rate-rigging scandal now offers a second opportunity to build the pressure for fundamental change. That's hard to imagine being carried out by a coalition dominated by the City-funded Tories, but Labour has also yet to break fully with its pre-crisis economic model.

Tougher regulation or even a full separation of retail from investment banking will not be enough to shift the City into productive investment, or even prevent the kind of corrupt collusion that has now been exposed between Barclays and other banks. As a report by Manchester University's Cresc research team argues this week, the size and complexity of the modern banking system makes it "near ungovernable".

Only if the largest banks are broken up, the part-nationalised outfits turned into genuine public investment banks, and new socially owned and regional banks encouraged can finance be made to work for society, rather than the other way round. Private sector banking has spectacularly failed – and we need a democratic public solution.

• This article was amended on 4 July 2012. The original misspelled Rebekah Brooks's name as Rebecca. This has been corrected.

• • Seumas Milne  guardian.co.uk,
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