Phuong Uyen Tran
The last piece in this series named leadership behavior, not capital or technology, as the real constraint on how fast a company can adapt. Harvard Business Impact’s own prescription for that constraint has a specific next step: redesign where decisions get made, moving approvals and accountability closer to the work, but only inside clear guardrails. Doing the first half of that without the second is not delegation. It is a different kind of bottleneck.
Centralized decision-making made sense when a handful of people at the top genuinely held the best information in the building. It stops making sense once customers, competitors, and technology move faster than any single approval chain can track, and speed becomes an advantage only when the people closest to a problem are trusted to act on it. But trust without structure is not a system. It is luck. The organizations furthest along on this front had done the less glamorous work first: deciding, in writing, which calls get pushed down and what guardrails travel with them.
PwC’s most recent Family Business Survey, published in November 2025, found a sharper version of this same problem inside Vietnam’s family-run companies specifically. Only 6 percent have a written family constitution, against 26 percent globally, and just 22 percent have a formal shareholders’ agreement, against 48 percent globally. Left without that structure, Vietnamese firms do not settle into an orderly middle ground. They split toward extremes: a smaller share than the global average run tightly centralized, but a full 25 percent are highly fragmented, five times the global rate. Decisions are already moving away from the founder’s desk in a quarter of Vietnam’s family businesses. They are just moving there without guardrails, which is not the same as moving there on purpose.
At Tan Hiep Phat, the mechanism of authority transfer was built in a deliberate way: one defined function at a time. Responsibilities expansion through procurement, marketing, PR, CSR, and gradually the whole business unit has come from trialed-and-proven trust. This trust is built through autonomy and the “right to fall” in specific domains with clear accountability. That specificity is the guardrail that provides confidence in both the incumbent decision makers and their empowered counterparts. A family business can gradually build its delegation of authority matrix without shocking the whole system, provided the boundaries of each handoff are as deliberate as the handoff itself.
Redesigning where decisions sit is what makes that unlearning durable instead of symbolic: it is one thing to question an old assumption out loud, another to actually move the authority that assumption used to justify. The next and final piece in this series turns to the discipline that decides whether the tools a company adopts next, from automation to AI, end up reinforcing that structure or quietly undoing it.
“Trust, once you build the structure for it, travels faster through an organization than any single approval ever could.” – Phương Uyên Trần
