Prof. Dave Ulrich, Michigan University, ranked as the #1 Management Educator and guru by Business Week

Prof. Ulrich, what can Vietnam do to make human resource (HR) become a national competitive advantage for economic progress? How can this be maximized?

There are two driving forces to move up the hierarchy of economic progress. The first is talent and human capital. Government should invest in education to ensure that citizens have the skills for the future in order to foster talent. Talent interventions may include specific methods such as: Government subsidizing through direct grants, tax abatements, or investments targeted at specific industries to encourage growth. Government learning of successful key factors in these targeted industry groups can be through the means of practice studies or industry forums, which can maximize the economic progress.

Government also needs to create sponsored education with student scholarship, faculty research grants, and degrees focused on targeted industries; co-sponsored education to employment transitions, e.g., Government funding a portion of one to three years of salary for targeted industries for qualified employees. Furthermore, Government and the targeted industry can establish co-sponsoring training initiatives where employees may attend consortia or focused events to acquire skills to participate in those industries.

The second driving force is collaboration. Countries who move up this hierarchy find collaboration between government, industry, education, and labor.  We see four stakeholders who each bring expertise to develop economic prosperity. For example, Government sets up policy to establish regulations, to encourage initiatives for target investment in infrastructure, thus setting themselves as role models. On the other hand, education develops talent, which trains future knowledge workers etc.

I suppose in order to enhance the national competitive advantage in economic progress, labor needs to ensure competence and commitment in order to continually learn and improve working skills. It should be noted that industries are the important stakeholders that creates global competitiveness while leveraging organizations’ successes.

Dr. Nguyen The Vinh, Delegate of Hanoi City People’s
Council and Executive member of WFPMA Global Studies Committee

Dr. Vinh, in order to build up a country of strong organizations, businesses with healthy and qualified human resource, there is a need for a strong country administrative system. As a Delegate of Hanoi City People’s Council, could you please share your view on what ways the state administrative system (structure) can run effectively and efficiently?

By my practical experiences and researches, I recognized that some effective and efficient state governance models have similar characteristics such as the lean model, flat organization structure, less staffing of leadership, clear functions and duties, international standards/ISO compliance and continuous improvement, privatization and socialization of economic sectors to reduce burdens for the Government, rejuvenation of management team, training and developing capabilities and skills, corporate and individual KPIs evaluation, good remuneration policies, as well as transparency in talents attractions.

Particularly, it is essential to focus on modern infrastructure, applying E-government etc., by which citizens can timely update the national information as well as contribute valuable ideas to the State. Those are the methods applied by some countries that may have a starting point like Vietnam or have their own preeminent ways such as Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, China, USA, UK etc. who have developed miraculously and gained tremendous success.

Vietnam would like to become a startup nation with the goal of reaching one million businesses in 2020. Prof. Ulrich, would you please highlight what ways Vietnam companies can grow sustainably given the fact that about 98% are micro, small and medium-sized enterprises?

In today’s world, there is access to financial capital to start and develop a business as long as the business has a competitive differentiation on their products or services that add values to their customers.  Therefore, I would encourage entrepreneurs to be very thoughtful about target markets and what their products or services would do to help customers. As target markets are defined, it goes through six phases of organization evolution to build a viable business: Idea - Loose federation – Early formal – Formal – Mature - On going.

Dr. Vinh, how can Vietnam attract domestic and foreign talents for an organization or business that wants to develop needs to have adequate human resources in terms of both quantity and quality?

One of HR standards is to ensure the work force with diversity and inclusion from the ISO Technical Committee on Human Resource Management (TC260), which I had participated. In my opinion, Vietnam is not well developed in this area while other countries have promoted actively such as USA, Germany, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, China etc. It is evident that those nations have attracted numerous international and domestic talents globally to enhance their growth. Meanwhile, the majority of Vietnamese students and postgraduates are keen on staying in foreign countries after completing their studies. According to statistics, the number of Vietnamese overseas students and professionals has increased dramatically over the years and reached about 120,000 people.

Hence, we need to have the appeal to retain the domestic talents while actively attract international professionals to Vietnam. The foremost thing is to identify and express the goodwill of the State: Vietnam considers the talent, capacity and quality of work to be the vital prerequisite in the recruitment and selection stages.

For the State agencies and enterprises, it is necessary to remove the local working style, the good positions arrangement for acquaintances, and nepotism. Instead, State agencies and enterprises should develop a fair and explicit working environment for all staffs. In addition, corresponding remuneration regime, paying adequately for the officers especially for labors in targeted industry, high qualified and skillful labors. Professional working environment also plays an important role to retain talents.

We overheard that HRCI (USA) publisher agreed to offer Vietnam the copyright of the book The Rise of HR, Prof. Ulrich is the Chief Editor of the book and Dr. Vinh is the Chief Translator to the Vietnamese version. Can you reveal some parts about the book’s contents?

This book contains the wisdom from 73 world leaders who have insightful comments on different opinions and specific ways to increase the values of HR. However, it is indisputable that modern HR management methods is recognized through the demonstration of the successful organizations who applies these methods
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When HR helps organizations attract and recruit talents, outstanding leaders promptly build up good organizational culture and branding, thus these organizations will have a foundation for success. Therefore, I am very glad to hear that “The Rise of HR” was translated into Vietnamese because this allows the Vietnamese HR community to have another resource to learn the views, managerial skills and methods from the world's leaders.

Once again, thank you for your time and best wishes for you both.

Ha Anh (Noted)