Phuong Uyen Tran
Eighty percent of business leaders now say operating amid constant, compounding change is essential to the job, according to Harvard Business Impact’s 2026 Global Leadership Study. Yet the same research traces the gap between that belief and real readiness to one specific cause: not capital, not technology, but leadership behavior, with nearly four in ten leaders naming slow-to-change habits at the top as the real limit on progress. As Target’s Ted Egly put it, the task ahead comes down to the courage to question the very thing that made us successful in the past.
That is a harder mandate than it sounds. Most organizations still treat transformation as a project with a start date and an end date, something to finish and then set aside. Harvard Business Impact’s companion research is blunt about why that no longer works: leaders who build change into how the organization runs, permanently, are nearly twice as likely to meet or beat their own targets as leaders who treat it as a one-time initiative.
Vietnamese manufacturers are living a concentrated version of this shift right now, not as theory but as a change in the ground rules. For three decades, the country’s export engine ran on the assumption that cost advantage plus scale would keep compounding, largely undisturbed. The trade framework Vietnam and the United States finalized last October gives that assumption an expiry date: a 20 percent US tariff on Vietnamese exports, now a permanent floor rather than a shock, replacing an average of roughly 3.8 percent as recently as 2024, even as Vietnam removes nearly all its own duties on American goods. And yet capital keeps arriving. Registered foreign direct investment reached US$40.63 billion in the first eight months of 2026, up 55.4 percent year-on-year, and manufacturing output has now expanded for fourteen straight months. Growth has not stopped but the playbook that produced that type of growth is already updating.
In the case of Tan Hiep Phat, we have already learned, on a smaller scale, what it costs to keep believing in a playbook after its logic has expired. Coca-Cola once offered to buy the company outright, in a deal reported at roughly US$2.5 billion, an offer that would have folded three decades of home-grown manufacturing into a multinational’s existing playbook overnight. The company said no. The reasoning required unlearning an assumption much of the industry still holds, that competing against global giants eventually means joining them. Independence meant building, slowly and without a guaranteed payoff, the capability to compete in categories those giants already dominated, the story I later examined at length in Competing with Giants. It is a challenging on-going process that keeps THP evolving in the right direction. In the past, if founder’s decisiveness has created speed, courage and scale to achieve unprecedented wins, now is the time to translate individual leaders’ capabilities into institutionalized strength and capabilities for THP to keep winning in the long run. This is not merely a process but rather what leaders at many Vietnamese manufacturers must embrace.
This is the first of three pieces this month on the leadership habits that can benefit manufacturers in Vietnam for unfolding changes. Unlearning old assumptions is the harder discipline precisely because it is a personal one; no capability audit or investment plan does it for you. The next piece in this series turns to a related discipline: not just what leaders should question, but where decisions should sit once they do.
“Adversity does not test only what a company can build. It tests what it is willing to let go of.” – Phương Uyên Trần
