As LuxGroup moves toward a holding-company model, its challenge is to turn the founder’s entrepreneurial spirit into an organizational capability that enables each business to act independently.
Dr. Pham Ha — Founding President & CEO, LuxGroup®
Every Monday, Luxers wear their uniforms. When welcoming guests and colleagues, we place a hand over the heart. The gesture expresses a commitment: to serve from the heart.
Yet as LuxGroup grows, I find myself asking questions that reach beyond these visible rituals. When a guest encounters a problem and the manager is absent, does the employee know what they can decide? When a commercial opportunity emerges, can a business leader act confidently?
The answers reveal how deeply our culture shapes everyday behavior—and whether it supports the organization we are becoming.
Culture Becomes Real Through Choices
At LuxGroup, People First®, Delivering Happiness®, and “Luxury is culture” guide how we create experiences. Vietnamese art appears aboard our boutique cruises. Heritage stories shape our journeys. Personal attention helps turn a trip into a lasting memory.
Underlying these choices is a belief that luxury should carry cultural meaning and create human connection. That belief becomes a competitive advantage when employees translate it into how they listen, explain, anticipate, and care.
Edgar Schein’s model offers a useful way to understand this process. Uniforms and greetings are visible artifacts. People First is an espoused value. Beneath both sit basic assumptions: what people take for granted about customers, authority, and how work gets done.
These deeper assumptions guide behavior when no procedure provides an answer. Leaders therefore need to understand what employees actually believe, including expectations rarely discussed openly.
Success Can Create Dependence
In a founder-led business, many early decisions naturally concentrate around one person. The founder understands customers, connects resources, creates brands, and protects quality. When this approach repeatedly produces results, consulting the founder can become an accepted habit.
That habit may persist long after the organization has developed greater scale and management capability.
As we work toward LuxGroup Holdings, I am examining whether expectations within our organization cause too many decisions to return to me. Where this happens, the reasons deserve investigation. Authority may be unclear. Managers may need additional capabilities. Previous experience may have taught them that waiting is the safest response.
My own behavior matters. If I ask leaders to take ownership but repeatedly reclaim their decisions, they learn from what I do. Delegation becomes credible through consistent practice.
The Gap Between Approval and Execution
Another challenge emerges after a decision has been approved.
An initiative can receive agreement and still move slowly. The proposer assumes operations will implement it. Operations waits for funding. Finance waits for a more specific plan. Responsibility becomes dispersed, and initial agreement fails to generate coordinated action.
This has led me to a preliminary proposition for my DBA research: founder approval may be treated as sufficient to trigger implementation, although execution also requires shared understanding, clear ownership, resources, and deadlines.
This proposition needs to be tested through decision records, interviews, and implementation timelines. Its value lies in identifying specific gaps that better governance could address.
For management, it also suggests a practical discipline. An approved initiative should have a named owner, defined authority, agreed resources, a completion date, and a review schedule. These arrangements make responsibility visible and give teams a common basis for action.
Preserve Identity While Developing Autonomy
LuxGroup Holdings is envisioned as a “House of Small Giants.” Each business needs entrepreneurial capability and responsibility for its results, supported by shared principles.
Culture must therefore help leaders distinguish between commitments that require consistency and practices that can evolve.
Care for people, cultural authenticity, and responsible conduct should remain recognizable across the group. Individual businesses need room to adapt their products, commercial approaches, and working methods to their circumstances.
This requires translating values into usable authority.
“Serving from the heart” becomes more actionable when employees know which guest requests they can resolve, what resources they may use, and when escalation is necessary. Ownership becomes clearer when leaders understand their objectives and review commitments.
Employees then have a stronger foundation for initiative. Managers gain a fairer basis for support and evaluation.
A Strong Culture Must Make Learning Possible
Luxury positioning encourages continual improvement. It can also narrow attention toward customers who already appreciate the established model.
Simpler alternatives may initially appear commercially insignificant. An AI-assisted planning service, for example, could serve travelers whose needs differ from those of a traditional luxury client. The strategic questions concern the barriers it removes, the attributes its customers value, and how its capabilities might develop.
Answering these questions requires employees to challenge assumptions about what has made the business successful.
At LuxGroup, the culture we need must allow people to raise concerns, suggest experiments, and discuss disappointing results openly. Leaders must make that behavior worthwhile through their responses.
Experiments also need boundaries. A defined budget, accountable owner, customer hypothesis, and evaluation criteria create a disciplined opportunity to learn. Evidence can then guide whether an initiative should continue, change, or stop.
Reinforce the Culture Through Management Systems
Rituals make culture visible. Management systems reinforce its practical meaning.
If collaboration is valued, performance discussions should recognize contributions across teams. If initiative is encouraged, leaders should consider the quality of judgment alongside the outcome. If responsibility matters, reviews should examine whether commitments were fulfilled and problems raised early.
These signals become especially important as the organization expands. Employees cannot rely on frequent contact with the founder to interpret every situation.
Hiring, onboarding, leadership development, and performance reviews must communicate compatible expectations. When these mechanisms reinforce one another, shared values become easier to apply across different businesses and locations.
The Founder Must Change Too
For me, the transition toward Holdings requires a different use of personal influence.
I need to devote more attention to clarifying purpose, choosing leaders, developing capabilities, and reviewing the quality of decisions. When a leader acts within delegated authority, I must give that person room to take responsibility and learn from the result.
This also requires accepting that a sound decision may differ from the one I would have made. Reviewing the reasoning, evidence, and boundaries offers a more useful conversation than treating personal preference as the standard.
Each consistent act of delegation helps establish that autonomy has practical meaning.
The maturity I want to see is straightforward: Luxers handling their responsibilities confidently, understanding their limits, and seeking support at the right time.
Then our hand-over-heart greeting carries greater weight. Behind the gesture stands the capability to act.
LuxGroup’s culture will continue through experiences created every day by people with the care, authority, and judgment to fulfill the brand’s promise. Building that capability is one of the founder’s most consequential responsibilities.
