Progress and innovation through creativity in Vietnam
Posted March 25, 2025 | Read this article on Idaho Statesman
“We conquered you in the war, we will conquer you in business.”
On my first day in Hanoi, Vietnam, 30 years ago, I heard this from a man whose waist was so small that the end of his belt wrapped around his back and flapped when he walked. In the university of 9,000 students where I worked, the office housing the four foreigners had the university’s only flush toilet and long-distance phone line. Hanoi had no sedans, mostly bicycles, and a few motorbikes.
Fast forward 30 years. The 10 million people who live in Hanoi have wifi and internet, hundreds of skyscrapers, and cars that include high-end Bentleys and McLarens. Citizens have e-passports, allowing them to check themselves through Vietnamese customs and immigration at lightning speed. Some 200,000 Vietnamese students study abroad and most kids learn English. It’s a different world.
That hit home in another way this week when I led a workshop on creativity. The university I work with had invited three experts on creativity—two Vietnamese CEOs and me, an American professor. I said I’d do a workshop, not a lecture. The pre-workshop chaos—chairs and tables strewn around, no organization, noise—made me wonder what I’d agreed to. But in Vietnam, chaos settles into the right path, just before showtime.
The 100-plus businesspeople who attended seemed game. I led them through a brainstorming exercise, and they soared. When I did a similar exercise 20 and 10 years before, I found that few people knew how to generate ideas: when they sat in groups, each person came up with ideas on his or her own and then combined them, meaning that many of the ideas overlapped and they had not built upon ideas with each other.
At the recent workshop, some 25 groups of four or five people generated 480 ideas in seven minutes. If even half or two-thirds of the ideas were overlaps, that’s still at least 100 ideas in a short time. They cheered themselves.
While the U.S. has in the past prided itself on its creative mindset, it can’t hold that badge alone. Watching these Vietnamese individuals generate wild and crazy ideas, develop a growth mindset, and have fun in the process convinces me that they may use creativity as a competitive advantage and, indeed, be able to conquer the U.S. in certain ways in the future.
About the Author
Nancy K. Napier, Ph.D., is a Distinguished Professor Emerita at Boise State University, Executive MBA professor of strategy and leadership