Vietnam Economic Times: What are the specific skills to be gained from the "Business Logic" course?
Dr. Vuong Quan Hoang: The training program has been part of our plan for a while now. Its title is very brief, as you can see, but its coverage is broad. It is about how to understand working envirionments and build analytical skills and capabilities for generating better efficiency. In short, the course forcuses on forcing the brain to work efficiently and critically.
We have analysed the need for skills very carefully. We interviewed many people, including business people, bankers, journalists, airline staff, government employees, and so on. What we learned from this exercise have proved to be important, so we decided to put together materials, knowledge, energy, experience, and skills to construct this special training program.
In practice, I belive there's a big gap between knowledge gained from academic pursuits and analytical skills at work. Many great performers in the classroom turn out to be idiots in an actual working environment. This is because of skills inadequacies. In today's competitive environment, without edaquate analytical skills, professionals will act as though they are "shooting at a black cat in a dark room". Lack of skill manifests themselves in various forms in daily business operations: poor responsiveness in a critical situation (leading to further problems); failure to understand business settings (leading to misperception); bad writing (triggering miscommunication); weak analytical skills (sometimes overcomplicating an easy problem, or oversimplifying a really complex issue), and so on.
Senior managers are no exception, either. I personally observed a case where a large multilateral institution decided to spend a million dollars and gained a failure, while a small group insde that same institution efficiently allocated a fraction of that amount and had remarkable success. Past experience had created too strong a mindset that obscured senior management's analytical views.
What are the deliverables of the course?
We focus on a set of critically important skills. Nonetheless, since many belong to this "class of important skills", we must limit them to the most critical. The following would be highly likely: (1) analysis of business settings and situations; (2) efficient writing and business communication; (3) constructing arguments in negotiations, discussions, meetings, proposals; (4) preparing proposals and devil's advocates; (5) working with numbers, methods, and numerical computations; (6) expert systems and the use of consultants; (7) understanding risk, feasibility, and decision theory; and others.
For those familiar with advanced management education programs, these things are readily appreciated, while novices will appreciated their challenge and usefulness. The point is we won't tell participants "what to do", but tell them the logical way of thinking so that they can decide what to think and how to do it on their own. I know that many would prefer to minic someone else's experience, but in business mimicking is, althoght easy, nerver a good way to solve real problems. A lazy brain skills. Since senior managers always work and think very hard, they naturally demand their colleagues and staff to do so as well. Failure to perform this important task is akin to losing a cutting edge in today's competitive market.
How will it be organised?
We assume that these skills are already in each person. The single most challenging job which we take on, is to bring them out so that participants in our program can use them efficiently and effectively. To this end, we won't call the delivery process "lecturing", because it itsn't. Instead, the right workd is "coaching". We have a group of really brilliant people; proficient scientists and expericenced educators, called facilitators, who will be able to coach different groups of participants, using a set of well structured training materials. The core of materials used in our delivery process is a set of notes, which will later become a complete, copyrighted book.
We prefer small-sized classes of 15 on average, so that we can maximise communication with participants. In fact, the coaching process also becomes more efficient since a large ratio of participants will be involved in discussions of specific issues raised by the facilitators.
Do you have any similar course on offer now or in the future?
There are plenty of training programs available elsewhere, in human resources, basic finance, interpersonal skills, etc. But I have not found any course similar to ours. Our course uses our own materials, developed in-house, and we retain the copyright. Therefore I believe that there won't be any course providing for exactly the same content. In brieft, I tend to say that ours is unique and very useful.
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The course was delivered to corporations and institutions such as VDC Ha Noi and Ho Chi Minh City, Cargill Ltd., to name but a few.
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My expectations are modest. Participants in our training programs will have the motivation to think more logically and work more efficiently. I have always asked myself this question: "Why do Vietnamese people fly to Hong Kong or Singapore for training? Why not have Hong Kong people or Singaporeans flying to Hanoi to attend our course?" If they come over here, we have an opportunity to tell them "Look! We have a nice and beautifull country to show you. We have good training programs for you, too".
Later on, we may think of organizing more advanced and technical courses on financial analysis or operations management, which usually require that participants have numerical and mathematical proficiency. I believe that the need for quality training will keep increasing.
Vietnam Economic Times, July 2005
