What is the single biggest lesson I learned this past year? It is: Focus, focus, and focus: both in terms of company management and personal development.
When an organization reaches a certain size, the most important thing is not only finding good business opportunities and executing them, but even more crucial is the ability to say NO to too many new business opportunities. Because burning/spending money will be much faster and easier than earning money. Therefore, choosing what to do is what truly matters!
Look at HAGL, Vingroup, and Novaland as lessons: while doing real estate with very attractive brands and booming sales, they nevertheless went on to do golf courses, food, supermarket chains, education, hospitals, minerals, agriculture, hydropower, electronics, marinas, and even charity, etc. Expending an unimaginable amount of money! And in the end, they shut down almost all of them to focus solely on a few core areas (HAGL on agriculture, Vingroup on real estate and automobiles, Novaland back to real estate), though perhaps quite late. If they had specialized deeply in a few fields and resolved each task definitively early on, we might already have had tremendously large conglomerates.
FPT in the past also fell into the trap of having too many things to do: securities, banking, fund management, real estate, retail, phones, etc. The FPT brand was too strong, leading people to think that doing anything would succeed. However, that was not the case. In the end, FPT withdrew from the financial sector, focusing all its strength on tech, telecommunications, and a portion of education. And they have been quite successful. If a company that once attracted so much talent and possessed a progressive corporate culture like FPT could not manage it, how could other enterprises? (Honestly, if FPT had focused solely on technology, we would already have a Samsung today!)
Very few organizations succeed while conducting business in too many things. Human and financial resources will be dispersed, especially in Vietnam, where money is never sufficient and the economic situation in Vietnam and the world is uncertain; top leaders lack enough experience and trial-and-error exposure to run super-large organizations. Remember that all of us have experienced the stock market and true market economy for only a few decades.
It is very difficult to acquire a truly outstanding team to work alongside because the high-quality labor market in Vietnam is far too scarce. How can there be enough talented people to do multiple things? Even if there are many talented people working together, the CEO himself will suffer from dispersed mental attention (mind-sharing), because merely giving a passing thought to something already drains energy. (For example: waking up in the morning, having a cup of coffee, reading a report of a tiny sub-biz and seeing it lost money, itching to make a phone call to the COO, talking for just 10 minutes, but then feeling irritated the entire day and accomplishing nothing else!)
I greatly admire the Phu My Hung company: They have only 433 hectares (expanded to 730 hectares) and have been working on it systematically for over 20 years. They execute very methodically and with focus; wherever they build, it becomes beautiful. Meanwhile, as for Novaland, if they had properly developed the 1,000-hectare AquaCity in Dong Nai first before jumping to other business sectors or locations, the company would have developed resplendently. Instead, before selling everything out, they jumped to do other things and did them very rapidly, which is why the company entered a crisis.
Therefore, for an enterprise, “focus” means clearly defining what one’s core competency is and what the most profitable business sector is. After that, use full strength to develop core capabilities and push the business forward. That is already exhausting enough. Where is the time to do other things?
Individuals working inefficiently are also largely due to straying off-course, wanting to do everything, losing focus, producing “half-baked results,” and ultimately having a bumpy career until old age. Our brains are not designed to do multiple things at once; “if you’re grinding corn, you can’t hold the baby”—no one can be distracted and still perform well.
You have probably met associates like this: They are very outstanding, debate very well, perceive problems very acutely, and execution capability is not bad at all. But in the end, you still have to part ways with them. The main reason being that they want to do many things at the same time and always think they possess sufficient capability and resources to do so. Only for nothing to end up good in the end. (At my company, this is always the primary reason when senior managers resign: lack of focus to bring work to a definitive conclusion).
My pet phrase when speaking to my associates at the company is always: “Please focus. Stop straying off-course.”
“Focus” for an individual/managerial leader means doing only what one is assigned to do, and not doing other tasks. For example, if your primary task is admissions, then think of every way to increase admissions, rather than going off to advise the government; if your primary task is recruiting talented people, then be obsessed with recruiting talent by all means, rather than complaining about office matters; if your task is marketing, then focus solely on doing marketing well first, rather than teaching others how to run the company.
“Focus” is doing what brings the best benefit to one’s strategic priorities. For example, if you have determined that health needs improvement, then instead of going out eating and drinking to socialize, spend time going to the gym; if English is your weakness for promotion, then study daily and do not let any reason get in the way (such as a lover, being a workaholic, or being overly considerate of friends).
“Focus” for a manager also means doing work that others cannot do better. If only you can develop the market, then spend most of your time thinking and doing that, pushing your market share from 5% to 15% instead of spending time operating; and if the current market is still vast, then think of every way to exploit it, rather than straying to expand other territories.
Our tendency to stray off-course is also easy to understand: often when capability is poor or execution fails, we tend to evade reality to reduce stress. When evading reality, there is nothing better than doing another task and rationalizing it by saying we are busy. But that is immensely harmful to both the individual and the organization.
From my personal experience, this past year I did only a few main things: 1) Raising financial resources for the company at all costs; 2) Finding talented people and creating conditions for them to perform at their best; 3) Definitively concluding two strategic investment deals into the most prestigious schools in Vietnam (for example, the Canadian International School in HCMC); That was all, doing nothing else! The remaining time was for family, gym workouts, reading books, playing golf, and coffee with close friends.
There will always be a reason for you to do something, but if you think carefully, you will see that the task is actually completely unnecessary for your company or personal development. The first question when facing multiple choices should always be: Is this task truly beneficial to my strategic priorities and the organization’s? And how much benefit? If yes and highly beneficial, then do it; if minimal, then have the courage to say NO.
On these spring days, I wish for us all to focus without straying, so as to accomplish the major goals set out (and keep it to just a few major goals, so we can actually focus)
Nguyen Quoc Toan
