How a culture based holding model can preserve entrepreneurial judgment while strengthening accountability
By Dr. Phạm Hà
Founding President and CEO, LuxGroup®
For a founder, growth brings an uncomfortable question: how much of the company’s capability still depends on one person being available? A business can expand its portfolio, recruit managers, and introduce reporting systems while leaving its most consequential judgments concentrated at the top. The organization becomes larger, yet its capacity to act independently develops more slowly.
At LuxGroup, this question shapes my doctoral research in business administration. Since Luxury Travel began in 2005, our activities have extended into boutique cruising, hospitality, dining, transport, and cultural experiences. My research examines how a proposed holding model could distribute entrepreneurial capability across these specialist businesses while preserving their identity. The framework remains a proposition to investigate through fieldwork and a bounded pilot.
Our ambition, A House of Small Giants, gives the challenge a practical meaning. Each business should possess the confidence and expertise to serve its market exceptionally well. The group should help it accomplish things that would be harder alone. Achieving that balance requires deliberate choices about authority, capital, culture, and the founder’s own behavior.
Make decision rights usable
Delegation becomes credible when managers know which decisions they can make, what resources they can commit, and when they must seek review. A job title provides little autonomy if every meaningful action still requires informal permission. Equally, autonomy becomes dangerous when responsibility exceeds competence, information, or financial capacity.
The proposed framework therefore starts with specific decisions. A specialist leader might receive authority to adjust a service within an approved budget and agreed standards. A major vessel investment would require group scrutiny because its financing and operating commitments could affect other businesses. A shared guest experience would need an identified owner and explicit commitments from participating teams.
Consider a hypothetical journey combining a city stay, a cultural restaurant, and a cruise. The commercial opportunity may be obvious, but delivery raises questions about pricing, service recovery, customer information, and accountability. Recording those responsibilities before launch would make coordination easier to assess. The test is whether the arrangement enables sound action without unnecessary escalation.
Translate culture into decisions
For LuxGroup, Luxury is Culture® expresses the importance of meaning, heritage, and human connection in the guest experience. Its managerial value depends on what it changes. A principle becomes operational when it influences a purchasing decision, the interpretation of an artwork, the treatment of an employee, or the response to a disappointed guest.
A holding model should protect those principles while allowing different expressions across brands. A destination management team and a boutique cruise operation need distinct expertise and operating routines. Shared culture should help them recognize acceptable behavior and resolve difficult choices. It should also leave room for local knowledge and creative interpretation.
This requires examining tradeoffs. Does a proposed experience represent local culture respectfully? Are contributors credited and compensated appropriately? Can employees raise concerns when a commercially attractive idea conflicts with our standards? Research should seek documented decisions, including rejected proposals, to establish whether culture genuinely influences action. Brand language alone cannot demonstrate that influence.
Fund learning in stages
Entrepreneurship requires room to explore uncertain opportunities. Financial discipline requires an explicit account of what that exploration could cost. The proposed approach connects both through staged commitments: define the problem, authorize a limited experiment, review evidence, and decide whether further resources are justified.
A new cultural experience, for example, could begin with a restricted service trial. Before approval, its sponsor would identify the intended customer, operational requirements, maximum acceptable exposure, and review date. The review would consider actual use, guest response, staff workload, and cash implications. Continued funding would depend on what the trial revealed.
Different investments need different tests. A modest service experiment and a new vessel carry very different obligations and consequences. Financial thresholds must reflect that difference. Stopping a trial can represent good judgment when evidence weakens the case. Expanding it requires a credible explanation of how the next commitment improves the opportunity without exceeding the group’s capacity.
Require the parent to earn its role
The proposed holding company must face an uncomfortable performance question: what value does it add after accounting for its own costs? Central coordination consumes management time and can delay decisions. Shared services deserve support when they improve access to capabilities, strengthen oversight, or solve coordination problems that specialist businesses cannot address efficiently themselves.
Potential contributions include leadership development, financial expertise, technology standards, and access to markets. Each should have a clear purpose and an accountable owner. Managers should be able to explain how group support helped a particular decision or outcome. They should also be able to identify duplicated work, slow approvals, and services that would work better closer to operations.
Vietnam Waterways® 2045 offers a strategic setting for examining these choices. The ambition brings together cultural experiences, maritime operations, investment, and coordination across businesses. In the research, it serves as a proposed strategic investment case. Its value lies in testing whether the governance design can handle consequential interdependence; the ambition itself provides no evidence of successful execution.
Change the founder’s role through evidence
As founder and researcher, I must examine how my own involvement affects the organization. Intervention may resolve a problem quickly while making managers less confident about acting next time. In other situations, founder participation may remain appropriate because relationships, risk, or strategic consequences require it. The study must distinguish necessary involvement from dependence created by unclear authority.
The research design proposes insider action research within an embedded organizational case. Following academic and ethical approval, selected decision episodes would be examined across destination management, cruising, and a shared initiative. Interviews, authorized records, observation, and decision logs would help compare intended authority with actual behavior. A bounded pilot would test the proposed tools.
This approach requires safeguards. Employees may reasonably hesitate to criticize arrangements associated with their founder. Voluntary participation, confidential reporting, and independent facilitation where feasible are therefore essential. Research accounts should remain separate from employee performance decisions. Contradictory evidence, stalled initiatives, and failed experiments must receive attention alongside favorable experiences.
Evaluation would examine decision time, reasons for escalation, implementation, financial exposure, coordination costs, and relevant guest or employee effects. Faster approvals alone would prove little if service quality deteriorated or risk increased. Improvement would need to be interpreted against the complexity of decisions, available capabilities, and other changes occurring during the pilot.
Leadership development belongs inside this evaluation. Delegating decisions creates opportunities to discover where managers need coaching, better information, or stronger operational support. Reviews should ask whether another leader could explain the reasoning, handle an unexpected problem, and prepare a colleague to assume responsibility. That would make succession a continuing organizational practice. It would also challenge me to accept different approaches when they remain consistent with agreed principles. The objective is capable successors with sound judgment and the freedom to develop their own legitimate leadership voice.
The leadership task ahead is to make entrepreneurial judgment more widely available across LuxGroup. A durable House of Small Giants would allow specialist leaders to act confidently, supported by shared principles and proportionate oversight. My DBA research will examine whether the proposed arrangements move us toward that goal. The legacy worth building is an organization whose people can carry its purpose forward through decisions they understand and own.
