Leadership is not the privilege of holding authority. It is the discipline of using authority to serve customers, employees, investors, communities and future generations.
By Dr Phạm Hà, Founding President and CEO, LuxGroup®
Many organisations describe leadership in terms of vision, decisiveness and performance. These qualities matter, but they do not answer the most important question: In whose interest is leadership exercised?
At LuxGroup®, our answer is expressed in a simple principle: Leading Is Serving.
This does not mean that leaders avoid difficult decisions or attempt to satisfy everyone. Serving is not the same as pleasing. A responsible leader must set standards, allocate scarce resources, confront poor performance and sometimes say no. But these actions should serve a purpose larger than personal authority or short-term financial results.
The Harvard Business School Online course Leadership, Ethics, and Corporate Accountability reinforces this philosophy. It examines the responsibilities leaders have towards customers, employees, investors and society, particularly when economic, legal and ethical considerations do not point in the same direction. Its central lesson is highly relevant to LuxGroup: leadership quality is revealed not when the answer is obvious, but when leaders must make consequential decisions in the grey areas.
From hospitality to responsibility
LuxGroup has evolved from a luxury tour operator founded in 2005 into a Vietnamese-owned House of Small Giants spanning travel, cruising, transport, hospitality, gastronomy, arts and culture. Today, approximately 300 Luxers serve more than 50,000 guests annually across a portfolio of specialised businesses.
As the Group grows, leadership becomes more complex. A decision made in one part of the organisation can affect guests, employees, travel advisers, suppliers, communities, shareholders and the environment. Growth therefore increases not only opportunity but also responsibility.
Our purpose, Delivering Happiness®, cannot be treated as a marketing slogan. It must shape how we design experiences, employ people, select suppliers, use technology, allocate capital and respond when something goes wrong.
This is where Leading Is Serving becomes an operating philosophy.
Serving customers means protecting trust
Luxury travel is built on asymmetry. The company normally knows more than the customer about the destination, supplier, vessel, hotel or experience being purchased. That knowledge creates commercial advantage, but it also creates an ethical obligation.
At LuxGroup, serving customers means describing experiences truthfully, communicating prices and conditions clearly, protecting personal information and never selling beyond our ability to deliver. It means placing safety, dignity and informed choice ahead of the pressure to close a sale.
This responsibility is especially important in bespoke travel. A guest may be purchasing a once-in-a-lifetime journey, anniversary or family celebration. The financial value of the booking is only one part of the transaction; the guest is also placing memories, time and trust in our hands.
When disruption occurs, leadership is demonstrated through ownership. We should not hide behind a supplier, contract clause or operational department. A Luxer must remain accountable until the problem is resolved.
Service may complete a transaction. Hospitality transforms a relationship.
Serving employees means creating fairness and agency
A people-first company cannot depend only on goodwill. Fairness must be designed into recruitment, compensation, performance evaluation, promotion and disciplinary processes.
LuxGroup’s HEARTS™ values—Humanity First, Excellence Always, Authenticity, Responsibility, Togetherness and Sustainability—define the behaviours we seek. Yet values become credible only when leaders “walk the talk”. Employees observe who is promoted, whose ideas are heard, how mistakes are handled and whether high performers are allowed to disregard the rules.
Leading as serving means coaching people to reach their potential while maintaining clear expectations. It means giving Luxers sufficient resources, decision rights and support to fulfil their responsibilities. It also means distinguishing between an honest mistake, a capability gap and deliberate misconduct.
The organisation must continue strengthening consistency across brands and locations. Sanctions for crossing business-conduct boundaries are currently reinforced through management responses, approval controls, audits, incident reporting and supervision. However, consequences are not yet defined or applied uniformly throughout the Group.
LuxGroup should therefore establish a group-wide disciplinary framework that specifies sanctions for different violations, assigns responsibility for investigations, documents outcomes and requires consistent application regardless of seniority or location. Confidential reporting channels and protection against retaliation are equally important. Leadership loses moral authority when rules apply strictly to junior employees but flexibly to powerful people.
Serving investors means protecting long-term value
Responsible leadership does not reject profit. Without profit, a business cannot invest, innovate, employ people or fulfil its commitments. But profit must be earned in a way that protects the organisation’s long-term capacity to create value.
LuxGroup’s leaders have a duty to exercise financial discipline, maintain reliable information and allocate capital according to strategic priorities. New vessels, hotels, restaurants and digital platforms should not be approved only because they are exciting or symbolically important. They must demonstrate strategic fit, credible economics, accountable ownership and acceptable risk.
The principle “Not the biggest, but the best” provides an important boundary. Scale is valuable only when it strengthens quality, resilience and impact. Growth that weakens service, damages the brand or consumes cash without creating sustainable advantage is not success.
Serving investors therefore requires the courage to stop projects, challenge optimistic assumptions and distinguish ambition from wishful thinking. Stewardship sometimes means moving faster; at other times, it means refusing to grow before the organisation is ready.
Serving society means creating value beyond the firm
Tourism depends on assets that no company owns completely: culture, heritage, landscapes, waterways, biodiversity and the hospitality of local communities. A tourism business cannot claim success if it generates revenue while degrading the very places that make travel meaningful.
LuxGroup’s Travelife certification, 5G strategy and Net Positive 2030 ambition provide a foundation for responsible growth. The challenge is to convert these commitments into everyday decisions.
That means selecting responsible suppliers, increasing local procurement, reducing waste and emissions, respecting cultural and animal-welfare standards and measuring whether communities share in the value created. Sustainability claims must be supported by evidence, assigned to accountable owners and reviewed with the same discipline as financial performance.
Our core belief, Luxury Is Culture®, adds another responsibility. Culture should not be reduced to decoration or entertainment. It must be presented with authenticity, context and respect. The people whose heritage creates the experience should be recognised as participants in value creation, not treated merely as background.
Serving in the age of artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence can help LuxGroup accelerate translations, prepare itinerary drafts, retrieve destination knowledge and personalise communications. But speed does not remove accountability.
AI should not independently approve pricing, contracts, safety information, supplier suitability or culturally sensitive content. A qualified Luxer must remain responsible for every material promise made to a guest or partner.
The leadership question is not simply whether AI can perform a task. It is whether the organisation can explain, verify and accept responsibility for the result. Technology should extend human judgement, not provide an excuse for its absence.
A practical test for LuxGroup leaders
Before making a consequential decision, LuxGroup leaders should ask:
- Is the decision legal and economically responsible?
- Is it fair to the people who will experience its consequences?
- Does it reflect our purpose and HEARTS™ values?
- Who benefits, and who carries the risk or burden?
- Have we listened to those closest to the issue?
- Would we defend the decision openly to employees, guests, investors and communities?
- Who will remain accountable if the outcome differs from our expectations?
These questions do not eliminate disagreement. They improve the quality of judgement and make the reasons behind decisions visible.
Leadership as accountable service
Leading Is Serving should not be mistaken for soft leadership. It is demanding because it requires leaders to combine empathy with standards, ambition with restraint, empowerment with accountability and innovation with control.
A servant leader listens, but also decides. A servant leader supports people, but does not tolerate misconduct. A servant leader pursues growth, but refuses to sacrifice trust for short-term results. Above all, a servant leader accepts responsibility rather than transferring blame.
For LuxGroup, this philosophy connects purpose with execution. Delivering Happiness® defines why we exist. HEARTS™ defines how we behave. Leading Is Serving defines how authority should be exercised.
The true measure of leadership is not how many people report to us. It is how many people are able to flourish because we led responsibly—and whether the business, communities and destinations entrusted to us are stronger because we served.
