DANG LE NGUYEN VU

background

A highly successful entrepreneur and businessman, Dang Le Nguyen Vu is the founder,

president, and director of the Trung Nguyen Group. He has been described by
Forbes and National Geographic as the “Vietnam Coffee King” and “Zero to
Hero”. Born in 1971, Dang Le Nguyen Vu attended Tay Nguyen University in 1990
and he studied to be a doctor. But, he realized that his heart belongs to coffee. At that
time, he had presented his idea to many people, but almost all of them denied it and
thought he was crazy. Many people said the idea was impossible. But he and hí
classmate still tried, started the very first steps with the vision to make Vietnam Coffee
global. By 1996 he had founded the Trung Nguyen Coffee Company and by 1998 he
had opened his first coffeehouse in Ho Chi Minh City. Since then, numerous franchises
have opened all over Vietnam and Trung Nguyên Largest Corporation.. He was selected
as “Pioneer of the Year” in a vote by VnExpress readers and won the prize of the “Gold
Star of the Vietnamese Top Brands in 2003”. In 2019, he divorced his wife and this
news had strongly affected the enterprise due to the shares dispute between them.
However, he still tried his best to maintain business performance and recently is dealing
with the coronavirus and guiding the company to go through difficult times.

Traits:
Conscientiousness:
Dang Le Nguyen Vu is an entrepreneur. As an entrepreneur, he of course
focuses on profits but he also pays more attention to human development and
product quality. (later on Leadership style)
Introvert
- He is a 60% introverted person since he does not share many things about his
own life. Or appear too much in the media. He tends to be quiet, and thoughtful.
He seems to be the one who stands behind the stage to support and run his
business.
- However, he is still 40% of an extrovert.Mr. Dang Le Nguyen Vu is always
open to young people; especially students; encourage them to start their
businesses and be creative; change nature; change family circumstances;
devoted to the country. He and his enterprise have organized hundreds of
exchange and seminar programs reaching up to 4, 2 million students inspired to
share experiences from influential people domestically and internationally, and
do many charity activities.

Open to experience and proactive people:

Trung Nguyen has launched different types of coffee, but he never stops developing and
trying to find out the unique flavor that fits for a specific market. Trung Nguyen Legend
is constantly innovating to succeed
- ” people can do it, so are we! Nations can do it, so are we!”.
Dark sides:
Narcissism: An exaggerated sense of one’s own abilities and achievements. A belief
that he or she is unique or “special” and should only associate with other people of the
same status. “If I were a maniac, this country would need many people like me.
Understanding more than normal people is not guilty, is it?”
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Leadership styles

Mr. Vu is a charismatic leader who has the ability to inspire and motivate people to do
more than they would normally do, despite obstacles and personal sacrifice.

1. Vision and articulation: Nguyen Vu has a vision and ambition to bring Vietnam
coffee to the world. With Nguyen Vu, Trung Nguyen is not only a brand but
also a Vietnamese coffee face and Vietnamese coffee identity. On his path to
success, we always see the bold imprint of national self-esteem. “Our ambition
is to become a global brand”, he told Reuters.

2. Personal risk: Nguyen Vu realized the potential for economic growth in

Vietnam through the improvement of the coffee sector, Mr. Vu established the
company while he was still studying medicine. He gave up to become a doctor,
without much business experience but with a strong love of coffee, he startuped
his first coffee shop with minor capital and his trust among people:“The initial
capital for my business was the trust of growers who gave me their coffee beans
based on the promise that I would share the profits with them”, he said.

3. Sensitivity for follower needs: He saw the need to strategically develop the
company’s human resources department. Mr. Vu noted: “You need to use your
passion to drive your plans and move your organization forward, through
comprehensive planning and excellent execution”. Vu has encouraged his
employees to fulfill eight fundamental tasks: creation inspiration, trademark
development and protection, Trung Nguyen style construction, consumer-
oriented approach, product improvement, win-win relations with partners,
manpower development, and community construction.

4. Openness (unconventional behavior): he has a new perspective and creative

thinking. Trung Nguyen coffee slogan “explore creative inspiration” indicates
his interests and fascination with novelty. He believes that coffee is a source of
creative inspiration to invent new ideas and stimulate success. He pays great
attention to building, developing and protecting the brand throughout its
operation to reach a global Vietnamese coffee brand. he has the ability to see big
picture and challenge to take risks, compete with big global brand coffee
Starbucks: “They are not selling coffee, they are selling coffee-flavored
water with sugar in it”
5. Corporate social responsibility: Philosophy of Trung Nguyen’s leader pertains
to designing business not only to generate personal wealth but also to enrich the
lives of employees and the prosperity of the Vietnamese society as a whole. Vu
says: “We make the most specialist coffee in the world, and through coffee we
want to create a sustainable development model, using coffee to come up with
value for society and for the environment.” Trung Nguyen is proud to follow the
key aspiration, which is to support the community to overcome poverty and
reach for a sustainable development.
 6. Inspiring: Trung Nguyen has established the ‘’Fund for creation 2005” which
greatly supports new entrepreneurs. Recently, Trung Nguyen and the Youth
Union have reached an agreement to develop a program which supports the
young generation known as “Creativity for Vietnamese aspiration”, offering free
100 million starting-business books for 23 million Vietnamese youths. Trung
Nguyen hopes that his effort will give Vietnamese youth a dig for
entrepreneurship ambition, help them overcome all difficulties and obstacles to
achieve their goals in life.
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Based on Motivation theories we will analyse the reason why Chairman Vu is
successful in motivating himself, employees at Trung Nguyen and also Trung Nguyen
customers.

MOTIVATING HIMSELF
Maslow’s hierarchy and Two-Factor Theory

The best-known theory of motivation ‘Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which

hypothesizes that within every human being there is a hierarchy of five needs. The
original five need are
In the case of Dang le nguyen vu, we supposed
that he wanted to satisfy the top level of
Hierarchy 'Self-actualization'.

During his growing, he step by step achieved

the lower levels in this hierarchy:

His family has been through a tough situation.

His father got sick but they didn’t get enough money for his treatment. After that, he
decided to be rich. He dropped out of Medical school, found a job to earn money to
meet basic needs, while starting learning about coffee. He has said: “If the goal is
getting out of poverty, we are still poor. But the goal is being rich, poverty is
automatically out.” (Physiological and Safety) (I suggest to remind the audience that we
have posted this quote on story to enhance our instagram management scores. You can
mention things like “If you have followed our instagram account, we have already
posted this quote on the story function.)

- he satisfied the 'Love/Belonging' through wanting to spread the Vietnamese coffee

around the world as a Vietnamese.

- He got Self-actualization when he was recognized by National Geographic Traveller

and Forbes Magazine as ‘Vietnam’s coffee king” and Forbes even named him as ‘Zero
to hero’. Moreover, he always gives incentives to the youth to create, change the way
they think and their life to contribute more to the country.

B. MOTIVATING STAFFS:

There are about 10.000 employees at Trung Nguyen. Trung Nguyen also indirectly
creates jobs for more than 15.000 people through 3000 franchise coffee stores all over
Vietnam. The management team of Trung Nguyen is mostly young, well-trained to
master professional skills with experienced consultants working in international
corporations. They are highly qualified, dynamic, enthusiastic and skillful. But in
particular, how did he manage his human resources management strategy?

STAFF RECRUITMENT:
Trung Nguyen expands their franchises in big cities such as HN and HCMC, where
there are a lot of Colleges and Universities, which provide them a large educated labor
force. The strength of young laborers is their enthusiasm and creativity at work.
Since the labors in Trung Nguyen coffee shops are mainly young people, especially are
students, staffs are employed as part-time staffs and working hours are divided into
shifts that they are able to arrange their own life schedule and are allowed to swift
shifts, which highly give them the satisfaction in flextime and job sharing aspects.
=> briefly summarize this part.
Self-Determination Theory

This proposes that people prefer to feel they have control over their actions, so anything
that makes a previously enjoyed task feel more like an obligation than a freely chosen
activity will undermine motivation. It suggests that pursuing goals from intrinsic
motives is more sustaining to human motivation than are extrinsic rewards.

Rather than expecting the extrinsic rewards, he believes the strong intrinsic motivation
with goal, creativity.

+ He stimulates the inspirational power of the young, with the goal of spreading
ambition, passion and approaching human knowledge.

+ Therefore he and Trung Nguyen started “A journey from the heart” for a great
intention which is called: “Journey of setting great mindset for start-up building
the nation”.

+ He built a life-changing bookcase with hundreds of titles of books belonging to

12 basic fields of life from thousands of books about the great person of
humankind. Giving away over 200 millions of books for 300 millions
Vietnamese young people with the cost approximately up to 5 billions dollars.
He also built a library of a hundred films, which are all the best movies of all
time, with the main goal being inspiration.

+ Since the coronavirus has had a strong effect on the economy, Chairman Vu has
written a letter for over 5000 employees. The letter was sent on March 28 - the
anniversary of the company's tradition every year, as an encouragement to share
and recall the entire corporation's "hardship and suffering" during this period. He
believes that “we can win this situation if we are together” and “we are Warriors
and we will make a legend as our name - Trung Nguyen Legend”.

But it doesn’t mean that Extrinsic motivation is ignored, because:

In 2011, Trung Nguyen established a fund called “Get creativity from scratch” in order
to encourage students to overcome difficulties to reach their goal in study.

Also, based on a yearly goal of cooperation, Trung Nguyen organizes training courses
for their employees to be more professional and knowledgeable.

Goal-setting Theory

At that time, it might have been hard to launch a new coffee brand. because there were
no people who advised him around him, and it was a poor environment. (For instance, at
first, all they could do is use a bike as transportation. and the people around him didn't
look at him with a good eye.) So, they could growing while thinking and making their
own feedback and it leaded them to success

Trung Nguyen culture

The business culture of Trung Nguyen Group is expressed through:

+ Faith: "The collective spirit is always strong". Creating cohesion of employees in the
company, developing strong human resources, always taking work efficiency as the
foundation.
+ Slogan: "explore creative inspiration" “激發創新” Jīfā chuàngxīnslogan in chinese
+ Strategic vision: To become a corporation promoting the rise of Vietnam's economy
to maintain the autonomy of the national economy and arouse, to prove a desire for
Dai Viet to discover and conquer
+ Mission: To create a leading brand by giving coffee drinkers a creative inspiration
and pride in the Trung Nguyen style imbued with Vietnamese culture.

He concentrates on build Trung Nguyen cooperation with 7 core values:

+ Get creativity from scratch
+ Develop and protect brand image
+ Take customers as center
+ Be successful with partners
+ Develop huge Human Resources
+ Take efficiency as base
+ Contribute to community

He also has successfully applied Organizational Justice theory as the employees at

Trung Nguyen coffee are satisfied with their current salaries because the pay they
receive is equivalent to the job which is not overloaded, stressful, or under-pressure. So,
they agree with their first salary on contract.

IF WE HAVE ENOUGH TIME: (put it on the slide before the last slide)
Under the management of Dang Le Nguyen Vu, Trung Nguyen has been gaining many
achievements that now are the benchmarking of the Vietnam Coffee industry. Let’s take
a look at this video.
trung nguyen history: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=dRa3YGe0wX8&fbclid=IwAR1xGKfbyATVF7Y5O-XQxmicFKTCjS-
0R5WCb3A0FolHwohtmfjWiP4OMKc

Questionnaire:
1. Before running his business in the coffee industry, Dang Le Nguyen Vu used to
be a student majoring in…….. (medical/business/engineering/agriculture)
2. Dang Le Nguyen Vu is….
a. conscientious, extrovert, open to experience
b. conscientious, introvert, open to experience
c. conscientious, open to experience, agreeable
d. introvert, open to experience, emotional stability
3. When he was recognized by National Geographic as “Vietnam's coffee king”,
which part of Maslow's hierarchy was he satisfied with? (Physiological/ Safety/
Love and belonging/Esteem/Self-actualization)
4. Which motivation does he believe more? (intrinsic motivation/extrinsic
motivation)
5. Chairman Vu and staff focus on how many core values to build up Trung
Nguyen? (Answer 7)
6. After listening to Dang Le Nguyen Vu leadership styles, describe your
standpoint.
7. Regarding his leadership styles, would you think he is a perfectionist in the
business field?