When the Founder’s Power Becomes the Company’s Power
By Dr. Phạm Hà — Founding President & CEO, LuxGroup®
A founder can build a company through the force of personal conviction. Building an institution requires something harder: giving other people the authority to shape what happens next.
That is the leadership challenge I face as LuxGroup moves toward a holding model—a House of Small Giants. Our specialist businesses need enough autonomy to serve their guests, develop their people, and respond to their markets. They also need shared standards, disciplined investment, and a culture that connects them. The question is whether the influence that helped me build LuxGroup can now help others lead it.
The founder’s invisible organization chart
Every founder-led company has two organizational structures. One appears in presentations. The other becomes visible when someone faces a difficult decision.
Who receives the call? Whose agreement makes a proposal feel safe? Who can overturn a manager’s judgment with a passing comment?
When the answer is repeatedly “the founder,” formal delegation has limited meaning. People learn to seek reassurance before exercising authority. Managers become skilled at anticipating preferences instead of developing judgment.
The founder may experience this dependence as evidence of commitment. Eventually, however, it limits growth. An organization cannot keep expanding its ambitions while routing its decisions through one person’s attention.
Understanding the power behind the title
Studying Power and Influence for Positive Impact helped me examine the sources of that dependence.
Positional power comes from formal authority. Personal power comes from knowledge, capability, and credibility. Relational power comes from connections that provide access to information, resources, and cooperation.
As a founder, I draw on all three. Experience helps me judge an opportunity. Relationships help me open a conversation. My position allows me to commit organizational resources.
The transition toward LuxGroup Holdings requires those advantages to become available to other leaders. An introduction should establish a manager’s standing. A difficult decision should develop judgment. Otherwise, the founder’s strengths remain difficult for the organization to reproduce.
Draw the map before moving the structure
A holding company can be designed on paper long before its people change how they work.
Power mapping helps explain the gap. Beyond formal approvers are respected colleagues, operational experts, trusted advisers, and partners whose cooperation determines whether a decision succeeds.
For LuxGroup, the useful starting point is one concrete decision. Who proposes it? Who supplies essential information? Who can authorize it? Who must implement it? Whose concerns could stop it?
The map must include the founder. I cannot understand resistance honestly while treating my own preferences as neutral. Sometimes the strongest obstacle to distributed leadership is the leader who says he wants it.
Make the center worth joining
Subsidiaries will judge the holding company through their daily experience.
Does the center improve access to customers? Does it develop leaders? Does it provide useful financial information and specialist support? Does it help resolve problems that an individual business cannot solve alone?
These questions turn the holding model into a proposition that must earn confidence.
If the center contributes mainly additional approvals, managers will develop workarounds. If it delivers capabilities they value, cooperation becomes easier to sustain.
A House of Small Giants needs a center that strengthens its members. Its legitimacy will grow through the usefulness of its contribution and the fairness of its decisions.
Choose the influence the moment requires
My familiar approaches include attracting people through a shared vision and bridging perspectives through conversation. Both matter in hospitality, where cooperation often crosses departmental and organizational boundaries.
But purpose cannot settle every operating question.
When a team needs evidence, I should persuade through reasoning. When urgent action is necessary, expectations must be explicit. When information is missing, I should listen. When tension prevents progress, a purposeful pause may help.
Influence becomes more effective when I respond to the obstacle in front of us. Repeating an inspiring vision cannot resolve a staffing shortage. Asking for more discussion cannot replace a decision whose facts are already clear.
Give people permission to change the plan
My waterways ambition has a personal beginning. In 1985, I traveled by ship from Hải Phòng to Sài Gòn and arrived at Nhà Rồng. That journey remains part of how I imagine Vietnam from the water.
Yet a powerful personal story can make disagreement difficult. Colleagues may assume that questioning the route means questioning the dream.
I must therefore make the invitation precise. Which choices remain open? What evidence could change the proposal? Under what conditions should we postpone?
A captain, guide, chef, or community partner must be able to improve the plan in ways I did not anticipate. Their participation becomes credible when their knowledge changes our decisions.
Begin with a decision people can own
Delegation needs a practical boundary.
A useful pilot would assign one recurring, reversible decision to a capable manager. We would agree the scope, available resources, consultation requirements, escalation conditions, and review date.
Then comes the difficult part for me: allowing the decision to stand when the manager chooses a reasonable approach different from mine.
If I routinely reclaim authority, I teach people to wait. If I withdraw support entirely, I leave them exposed.
The review must examine reasoning alongside results. A disappointing outcome can follow a responsible decision. Learning requires enough scrutiny to improve judgment and enough fairness to keep uncertainty visible.
Build a board that can challenge conviction
The holding transition also requires meaningful oversight.
A board adds value when its members can question assumptions, obtain relevant information, and examine proposals independently. Friendship with the founder cannot substitute for that work.
For an investment, enthusiasm should begin the discussion. Evidence must carry it forward.
What demand supports the proposal? What resources does it require? Who owns delivery? What would make us redesign or stop?
These questions protect the ambition by testing the commitments made in its name. I should welcome them most when I feel most certain, because certainty can narrow the attention that a consequential decision deserves.
Keep power open to correction
The course’s discussion of hubris and self-focus brought the responsibility back to me.
Experience can become overconfidence. Commitment can become impatience with another person’s perspective. A respected leader can receive agreement so consistently that he stops recognizing how carefully disagreement is being filtered.
Humility requires accurate awareness of my limits. Empathy requires attention to what decisions ask of others.
Both need observable habits. Let the person closest to the work speak first. Ask what could invalidate a favored assumption. Explain when a colleague’s objection changed the decision. Employees will believe challenge is welcome after seeing it handled fairly, repeatedly.
Make 2045 accountable to today
Vietnam Waterways® 2045 gives this leadership transition its longest horizon. I want Vietnamese-designed vessels to help guests discover our rivers, seas, trading ports, and coastal communities, with opportunities to reach further into Asia.
The dream needs decisions that can survive examination today. Each experiment should reveal something about demand, service, operating capability, or partnership. Each larger commitment should rest on what we have learned.
Two things keep me moving: seeing Luxers become confident enough to decide independently, and seeing guests connect with Vietnamese culture.
If those experiences multiply, the vision gains substance. And if others can carry that work forward with judgment, courage, and care, the founder’s power will have become the company’s capacity to endure.
