Simple stories about business management, life management

Phan Van Truong was born in 1946 in Hai Duong province. In 1967, he passed the French National School of Bridges and Roads, and then settled there. He is a senior expert in the field of international negotiations and an advisor to the French Government on international trade. With his great contributions to the development of France, Phan Van Truong was awarded the National Order of Protection by the French Government and many other noble awards.

Phan Van Truong is a rare talent, he is both an engineer, an economist, a business leader leading many large corporations in the world with thousands of employees in many countries. And with books that are loved by many readers, he is also a delicate and talented writer through attractive and engaging pages. "A life of management" is the experiences from his own life. Practical and sincere, simple but no less lively, Phan Van Truong himself urged himself to write and share: “It is true that nothing can replace real life. The expectations of readers have made me aware of the basics of education: the value of experience is the highest, no dogmatic theory can replace experience, no lesson is more valuable than the wounds that the author himself has felt and learned. The book you are holding in your hands will retain that spirit. I am fortunate to have experienced every position from pawn to marshal during my 40-year career, on all international and domestic battlefields, in most basic areas of the economy. What are you waiting for to share, I told myself.” The whole book is, indeed, the sharing of a talented and dedicated person, who wants to spread a way of life, a way of behaving, and more broadly, a culture of management, to Vietnamese businesses.

Author Phan Van Truong at the book launch of “A Lifetime of Management”. Photo: Zing.vn

“A Lifetime of Management” consists of 22 chapters, the chapter titles show that the author - a businessman has spent a lifetime of management, facing difficulties and challenges, clearly understanding the good and bad, right and wrong in leadership, in the business environment, offering feasible and clear solutions, aiming at the strategy of diversification, internationalization, merger and unleashing creativity.

Many people are impressed by Phan Van Truong's explanation of management and administration: "Management, in short, is the art of choosing work, choosing goals, then choosing people, choosing a path, choosing the time to go and arranging to achieve the common goal. Using people here clearly means taking advantage of the personality, ability, and willpower of the staff working with you, releasing their useful creativity, maximizing their motivation and mind, and finally achieving the goal chosen from the beginning. But more than that! When the work is done and the staff feels true happiness in their work, then it is called management. The difficulty in management is connecting people with people, and creating motivation and maximum creativity". This understanding of management is accurate and substantial, specific, clear, and easy to reflect on. It is even expanded in scope, not only in corporate culture, but also in any other unit, including the vast scope of life.

Many other issues were also raised and thoroughly resolved by Phan Van Truong such as: How to make a business last? How to effectively manage people? How to start a business to be successful? And to wrap up nearly 500 pages of the book, the final chapter titled "A thousand reasons to be optimistic" expresses confidence in the future of businesses and the young generation of Vietnam: "We should place our hopes on Vietnamese start-up groups, young people full of enthusiasm and courage. They lack everything, but they possess the most valuable asset: creativity. They need support, and the majority will succeed, later being able to lift the country's economy up a few notches, breaking out of the inherent real estate vicious circle. Vietnamese youth already have a wonderful creative mind that the entire community needs and should develop."

“A Lifetime of Management” by Phan Van Truong, Tre Publishing House, 2017. Photo: Bao Nguyen

Phan Van Truong has accompanied the readers in a thick book, full of information with a close, sincere, and encouraging tone. He wrote from the experiences of an insider, having gone through difficulties, even failures, and confidently, courageously asserting his own success. As an international businessman, the Vietnamese soul is still imbued in the way of thinking, behaving, understanding and sympathizing with corporate culture in "A Lifetime of Management". Business people will certainly find many interesting things in the book. And many people who do not do business also love the simple stories told here, because they can find directions to manage their lives...

Bao Nguyen