LuxGroup’s transition to a House of Small Giants depends on giving each business the people, decision processes, and economic measures it needs to grow.
Dr. Pham Ha
Founding President & CEO, LuxGroup®
A guest may remember the art on a cruise, the story behind a Vietnamese dish, or a guide who noticed an interest that never appeared on the itinerary. At LuxGroup, those moments are the product. They require people who understand culture and have the judgment to make an experience personal.
For more than two decades, I have helped shape that judgment. As founder, I have connected ideas across travel, cruising, hospitality, and culture; protected the character of our brands; and made decisions when the path was uncertain. Founder involvement helped build LuxGroup. It also raises a question for our next stage: Can an organization grow beyond the decision habits that made its early success possible?
This question sits at the center of my DBA research on LuxGroup Holdings. Our ambition is to build a House of Small Giants: distinctive businesses with capable leaders, a shared culture, and the freedom to develop their own opportunities. To achieve it, we need to understand what our current organization is built to do well—and where a new opportunity requires a different way of working.
The organization behind the experience
A company’s capabilities are often described in terms of its assets. LuxGroup has experienced people, brands, partners, cultural knowledge, and customer relationships. These resources matter, but they tell only part of the story.
Capabilities also depend on processes: how teams design an itinerary, approve expenditure, coordinate a launch, resolve a guest issue, and learn from a result. They depend on a profit formula: the criteria, spoken or unspoken, that determine which customers receive attention and which ideas merit investment.
Together, resources, processes, and the profit formula explain why a company can excel at one task and struggle with another.
Our premium travel model rewards personal attention, cultural depth, and carefully managed delivery. Its teams are accustomed to complex requests and high expectations. Those habits help us serve demanding guests. Yet they may be poorly suited to a service that must handle many smaller transactions quickly and at a lower cost per booking.
The distinction matters because a promising idea can fail inside a successful company without ever receiving a fair test. It may be assigned capable people whose primary obligations lie elsewhere. It may move through approvals designed for a different level of risk. Its early returns may be judged against the margins of an established business.
Leaders can mistake this result for evidence that customers did not want the idea. Sometimes the organization did not give the idea a workable operating model.
A practical test for LuxGroup
LuxGroup is developing LuxTravelDMC.asia as a B2B platform for travel sales professionals. We are also separating our B2B and B2C digital approaches, serving target markets in five languages across luxury travel, adventure travel, luxury groups, events, and tailor-made journeys.
The platform presents a useful test of organizational design. Its potential will depend on more than the quality of its website. Travel professionals need clear product information, reliable responses, confidence in delivery, and reasons to return. The team building that relationship needs the ability to observe how agencies use the platform and improve it.
If the same people must give priority to today’s established accounts, platform development may repeatedly wait. If every change requires a long approval cycle, feedback from users will arrive faster than the organization can respond. If management expects the platform to produce the same contribution as a mature premium travel business immediately, investment may stop before agency adoption has had time to develop.
These are risks to examine, not conclusions about the platform’s performance. The question is whether its people, processes, and measures match the work it has been asked to do.
A dedicated team could take responsibility for agency onboarding, product content, response times, and platform improvement. It could review adoption, qualified enquiries, repeat use, bookings, service costs, and contribution over time. Those measures would give leadership a clearer basis for deciding what to improve and how much to invest.
Separation needs substance
Established companies often respond to a new opportunity by announcing a separate business unit. A name and an organization chart, however, do not give a team room to act. Its leaders need clear authority over defined decisions, access to resources, and a way to resolve issues shared with the wider group.
At LuxGroup, this means specifying which decisions belong to the holding company and which belong to each business. Cultural integrity, brand promises, responsible conduct, and major capital commitments require common standards. Decisions about product tests, agency engagement, and day-to-day improvements can sit closer to the people who see the customer response.
That division should be written into working practice. For an initiative, we need to know who owns it, what they may decide, what budget they can use, what support other teams must provide, and when results will be reviewed. Founder approval alone cannot supply these answers.
This is a proposition I intend to investigate in my DBA research. I want to examine how decisions move from proposal to approval to implementation at LuxGroup. Decision records, timelines, observations, and interviews can help identify where authority is clear and where work slows. Until that evidence is gathered, founder dependence should remain a research question rather than a declared finding.
There is a personal dimension as well. A founder may grant authority formally while continuing to shape every consequential choice through informal involvement. If I want leaders to exercise judgment, I must make the boundaries clear and then allow them to use it. Review should test the quality of their reasoning and results, giving them a basis to learn and decide again.
Keep the culture, develop the capabilities
Autonomy does not mean that every LuxGroup business should invent its own values. Our belief that “Luxury is culture” connects what we do across travel, cruising, art, and hospitality. People First® and Delivering Happiness® guide how we treat guests and colleagues.
Shared culture becomes more valuable when leaders can put it into practice within different businesses. A cruise leader, a travel adviser, and a digital platform manager may all serve the same purpose through different decisions, operating rhythms, and economic models. The holding company’s role is to help them develop those capabilities while protecting the trust attached to the group.
This gives LuxGroup Holdings a practical agenda. It must develop leaders, allocate capital, maintain standards, and make learning travel across the businesses. It must also recognize when an emerging venture needs time and measures appropriate to its stage. Financial discipline is strongest when a team knows what it is expected to prove and when leadership will decide what follows.
Our vision for Vietnam Waterways 2045 makes this work urgent. A long-range ambition spanning vessels, destinations, partnerships, and cultural experiences cannot depend on one person’s judgment at every turn. It needs people who can make sound decisions together, execute them, and learn from the evidence.
The founder’s task therefore changes. I must continue to protect the convictions that gave LuxGroup its identity while helping others build the authority and capability to carry them forward. A House of Small Giants will become real when each business can act with purpose, answer for its results, and contribute strength to the whole.
