Building a House of Small Giants requires ambitious goals, entrepreneurial accountability and a culture grounded in Integrity, Effectiveness and Happiness.
By Dr Phạm Hà
Founding President & CEO, LuxGroup®
Growth creates a paradox for entrepreneurial companies. The systems introduced to control expansion can gradually suppress the very initiative that made growth possible. Yet too little structure produces fragmentation, duplicated effort and inconsistent customer experiences.
LuxGroup® faces this challenge as it evolves from one specialist travel company, founded in Hanoi in 2005, into a diversified Vietnamese group operating across travel, cruises, hospitality, mobility, gastronomy, arts and cultural heritage. Today, approximately 300 Luxers serve more than 50,000 guests annually through a portfolio that includes Lux Travel DMC Asia®, Heritage Cruises®, Emperor Cruises®, Amiral Cruises®, LuxTranCo, LUX Hotels & Resorts™, Vị® and Lux Arts Collection®.
Our ambition is not to become the biggest. It is to become the best—a House of Small Giants in which every business retains its entrepreneurial character while gaining the strength of the wider group.
Achieving this ambition requires more than inspiring language. It requires an operating model that creates productive pressure, encourages innovation and translates values into everyday decisions.
Create an Entrepreneurial Gap
Traditional organisations often give managers narrow responsibilities closely matched to the resources they control. This may create predictability, but it can also encourage managers to protect their departments instead of creating value across the enterprise.
At LuxGroup®, leaders are expected to take responsibility for customers, people, performance and profit and loss. Their accountability is deliberately broader than the resources under their direct authority. A cruise leader, for example, cannot create an exceptional voyage through ship operations alone. The complete experience may depend on Lux Travel DMC Asia® designing the journey, LuxTranCo coordinating transportation, Vị® developing culinary elements and Lux Arts Collection® interpreting Vietnamese heritage.
This difference between what leaders control and what they must deliver creates an entrepreneurial gap. To close it, they must influence colleagues, form alliances, share information and mobilise expertise across organisational boundaries.
The principle is straightforward:
Give leaders fewer resources to own, broader outcomes to deliver and sufficient influence and support to succeed.
Without support, wider accountability becomes overload. Without accountability, abundant resources create complacency. The leadership task is to maintain productive tension between the two.
Use Stretch Goals to Change the Method
LuxGroup® aims to achieve approximately 30% growth in 2026 while protecting service quality, strengthening profitability and advancing its sustainability commitments. This is not a conventional budget target. It It is a stretch goal because it cannot be reached simply by asking people to work longer hours or sell more of the same products.
It requires us to work differently.
We must identify higher-value markets, redesign experiences around emerging customer needs and use customer data and artificial intelligence more effectively. We must improve direct and partner distribution, strengthen revenue management and connect businesses that have historically operated independently. Every operating leader must understand which customers, products and channels create profitable growth—not merely additional volume.
Stretch goals work only when they occupy the right zone between comfort and impossibility. If a goal is too easy, it confirms existing habits. If employees consider it impossible, it may destroy motivation or encourage undesirable shortcuts.
Therefore, ambitious targets must be accompanied by credible strategic choices, measurable milestones and visible executive support. Leaders must explain not only what must be achieved, but also why it matters, where growth will come from and which old assumptions must change.
Replace Internal Competition with Transparent Peer Learning
Performance comparison can generate useful pressure. It can reveal exceptional performers, expose persistent weaknesses and force conversations that managers might otherwise avoid. However, rigid forced-ranking systems can also produce fear, political behaviour and unhealthy competition.
That risk is particularly significant in hospitality. A guest’s experience is created through numerous human interactions, often involving several teams and brands. If employees withhold information to protect their own ranking, rankings, the entire customer journey suffers.
LuxGroup® should therefore emphasise transparent comparison among comparable businesses and teams rather than impose fixed rankings on individuals. A concise operating dashboard can track indicators such as:
- Revenue growth and profitability;
- Guest satisfaction and loyalty;
- Service recovery;
- Employee engagement and retention;
- Cross-brand contribution;
- Sustainability performance;
- Compliance and cultural integrity.
The purpose of comparison is not to identify a predetermined number of losers. It is to identify performance gaps, recognise excellence and transfer successful practices. High-performing teams should explain how they achieved their results. Teams falling behind should receive coaching, a defined improvement plan and access to proven methods from elsewhere in the group.
This converts competition into institutional learning.
Build Temporary Teams Around Real Problems
Information moves naturally up and down reporting hierarchies, but rarely moves horizontally with the same speed. As organisations grow, departments and brands develop their own language, priorities and routines. Valuable knowledge becomes trapped inside organisational silos.
LuxGroup® can address this through temporary cross-business task forces established around clearly defined strategic challenges. A task force might improve the end-to-end guest journey, create a common customer-data platform, launch a new cultural cruise, reduce waste across the fleet or develop the Vietnam Waterways® vision.
Membership should reflect the problem rather than organisational rank. A new cruise-development team, for instance, might include representatives from marine operations, hospitality, finance, sales, gastronomy, transportation, arts, sustainability and technology.
Each team requires a specific outcome, an accountable leader, decision rights, a deadline and measures of success. Once the challenge has been resolved and the knowledge transferred into normal operations, the team should be dissolved. This preserves cross-unit collaboration without creating permanent organisational bloat.
A full matrix structure, in which employees formally report to two managers, should be used selectively. Matrix organisations can improve coordination, but unclear authority often produces slower decisions, conflicting priorities and excessive meetings. LuxGroup® needs the benefits of horizontal collaboration without turning every decision into a negotiation.
Put People First—But Define What That Means
Performance pressure alone cannot sustain execution. Employees also need a shared belief system that helps them decide how to act when policies are incomplete or stakeholder interests conflict.
For LuxGroup®, that belief begins with People First®.
Prioritising employees does not mean avoiding accountability or accepting weak performance. It reflects our theory of value creation: cared-for, capable and empowered Luxers create meaningful guest experiences; happy guests become loyal customers and advocates; that loyalty produces profitable growth and enduring shareholder value.
People First® is expressed through three established core values:
Integrity. We communicate honestly, respect the cultures we represent, keep our promises and accept responsibility for our decisions.
Effectiveness. We focus on meaningful outcomes, use resources with discipline and continually improve how we create value.
Happiness. We consider whether our decisions create lasting wellbeing for Luxers, guests, partners, shareholders and communities.
Together, they form a practical proposition:
People First® means acting with Integrity, delivering with Effectiveness and creating Happiness.
These values must sometimes guide difficult choices. If a profitable experience misrepresents Vietnamese culture, Integrity tells us to change it. If a popular activity consumes resources without creating sufficient value, Effectiveness requires us to reconsider it. If short-term growth causes exhaustion among Luxers or harm to a community, Happiness demands a more responsible solution.
Turn Values into an Operating System
Values become credible only when they influence projects, projects, promotions, investment decisions and rewards.
LuxGroup® can introduce a Values in Action Review for every significant initiative. At the beginning of a project, the team should translate each value into specific commitments. When developing a new cruise, for example:
- Integrity may require cultural accuracy, transparent partner agreements and promises that operations can fulfil.
- Effectiveness may require clear responsibilities, disciplined budgets and measurable guest and financial outcomes.
- Happiness may require an explicit assessment of the effects on Luxers, guests, suppliers and local communities.
These commitments should be reviewed at project milestones alongside financial and operational results. Recognition should go not only to employees who achieve targets, but also to those who strengthen collaboration, protect trust and help other businesses succeed.
Recruitment, onboarding, leadership development and performance evaluation must reinforce the same expectations. Leaders carry the greatest responsibility: employees judge an organisation’s real values by observing which behaviours leaders reward, tolerate or challenge.
Productive Pressure, Not Fear
The central leadership challenge is not choosing between performance and humanity. It is designing an organisation in which they reinforce one another.
LuxGroup® needs ambitious goals, transparent accountability and disciplined financial management. It also needs trust, cross-business support and a cultural compass strong enough to guide decentralised decisions. Creative tension should encourage people to challenge assumptions and act entrepreneurially—not fear failure, conceal problems or compete destructively.
That is how a House of Small Giants can grow without losing its soul: each business remains small enough to care, specialised enough to excel and accountable enough to perform, while the group provides the purpose, capabilities and connections that allow everyone to achieve more together.
We touch hearts. We deliver happiness. We grow through Integrity, Effectiveness and Happiness.
LuxGroup® — A House of Small Giants
Luxury is Culture® | Delivering Happiness®
