ACCESS TO BREAKTHROUGH PERFORMANCE

In the beginning, we did not have any activities to engage our team members; rather we focused on giving our team knowledge and technical skills. Then when Mekong Capital started expanding rapidly, the lack of internal connection and clear communication resulted in everyone working in silos, lots of fighting, and office politics. In the end, few or no people saw themselves as responsible for any results, and everyone had an explanation that it was someone else’s fault. Therefore, in December 2007, we engaged in a transformation journey to deliver fully on our potential.

As we embraced our new direction, we had the opportunity to attract new talents who were enthusiastic about the future and culture we were building.  Then when we started to identify what core values were important to us and build our culture around those core values, more and more team members began to take ownership, see the value, and support this transformation.

By 2010, our transformation process was complete. Over the years, we have built a stable and well-balanced team, strongly empowered by our core values to deliver breakthrough results to Mekong Capital and our investee companies.

We continuously re-discover our core values towards the fulfillment of our vision. Now we have three core values precisely targeted at what kinds of behaviors lead to results.

To make the cultural transition more familiar to the employees, we actively organize training courses and programs so that new employees can discover the core values for themselves and practice them in their work.

To ensure harmony and balance between work-related commitments and personal commitments, we created a space for our shared personal commitments, which we call Personal Purposes. We empower each other and even create shared opportunities for all our employees to realize their personal commitments in life.

Along the way, many of our investee companies noticed the change that happened within Mekong Capital, and they wanted something similar for themselves. Most notably, Mobile World was able to transform its culture over a single year. Starting with the strong commitment of the five co-founders of Mobile World, they cascaded down to build a culture of integrity and customer focus. And this culture still runs very deep in Mobile World, being embodied by its 65,000+ employees.

During this journey, we discovered that the performance of Mekong Capital, and ultimately the performance of our investee companies, starts with who are being and how we empower the success of each other and our investee companies. Therefore, standing in our shared commitment to each of our investee achieving their visions, we have designed our involvement in such a way that our investee companies take actions to create for themselves ways of looking at things that lead to breakthroughs in performance necessary for their vision to be achieved.

But it wasn’t easy at first. Many of our investee companies had a view that the core values were outside of their urgent priorities – they would get around to them eventually. Often, employees were of the view that the core values were aspirational, or for marketing purposes, not that it was their job to apply the core values in their actions every day.

Through much trial and error, we learned to work closely with our investee companies to coach them to develop their corporate cultures around their core values and empower them to practice applying their core values. The more that a company’s management team practices the application of core values in their day-to-day actions, the more they will see that it works and will keep doing it. Since then, we continued to re-invent our interactions with our investee companies to be much more powerful and impactful, which leads to our investee companies’ performance has improved significantly.

Watch Crab Hotpot Cartoon by Chris Freund, a story about the power of a shared vision and personal transformation in corporate culture.