Cover Photo by Christine Sponchia from Pixabay

I am a Vietnamese entrepreneur and about to launch my next venture in Vietnam. Ego development and identities of founders in emerging markets is my research interest.

Identity of a person is a monologue about “Who am I” and “Who am I in this society?"

The environment and founder’s mindset are in a mutual relationship. Developmental Psychology offers an interesting explanation for how the relationship affects business trajectories.

Personal identity shapes the company governance structure

At most failed ventures, the founders could not tell apart “My Identity” and “My Outcomes”. This brings many dire consequences to their company governance and management:

1. They cannot separate Ownership, Governance, and Management
2. It’s hard for them to delegate and build trust in teams. Since the founders rarely accept opposite opinions or facts against their personal beliefs.
3. They tend to attach successes and failures to their personal identities. Thus, it often takes these people a lot of time, even 5 years, to recover from some unexpected events. Common mantras include:
   • “The product is my baby."
   • “Martyr for the mission”
   • “It is better to live one day as a lion than a thousand years as a sheep.”

Corporate culture originates from family

With the rapid urbanization, young generations migrate to urban areas for livelihoods. To some extent, this trend breaks the family structure in rural areas. The migrants likely have an inferiority complex about their original identities. This creates barriers for them to join an environment of multicultural identities. People with a rigid family identity or strict social norms suffer similar phenomena.

The inferiority complex brings:

1. Difficulties in creating ecosystems for complex or knowledge-intensive products. Corporations are often based on familial or tight-knit relationships.
2. Desperate need for an instructional manual or a model for how to behave. In other words, they are often adopting external identities or claim that “I and we should live this way”.
3. More engagement in office politics.

Despite these common phenomena, I’m not about to paint everyone with the same brush.

Mozart is an Austrian genius of music. This does not mean every Austrian has an aptitude for music.