Golden Communication Group attended ZeroDX in 2025 and were honoured to receive the Transformational award. Since then, Golden have continued their journey with even more growth and development, including drawing on ideas from Haier and ZeroDX.
Their CEO, Nguyễn Minh Hương, updates us in 2026 in her own words:
With the consulting and partnership of Teal Unicorn, Golden Communication Group began its transformation journey in Q4 2023 and has since gone through a profound change in the way we lead, manage, and organise our work.
In the early stage of our organisational transformation, we focused on changing our management mindset, the way teams collaborated, and the level of autonomy people had. Today, we are taking another step: building a system that enables the principles of Open Management to truly operate within an organisation with multiple Micro Enterprises and many projects running simultaneously.
This is not a story about Golden “adopting” a new management model. It is a story about how we have gradually changed ourselves to become a better organisation.
From a Traditional Organisation to a More Open Golden
If I had to use one image to describe what Golden has been through, I would still choose the one we previously used: “The Rebirth of the Phoenix.”
Golden was once an organisation operated through a fairly traditional structure: a clear hierarchy, functional departments, and relatively fixed divisions of work.
But as the market began to change faster, customers became more complex, and the pace of change and competition in the communications industry continued to accelerate, we began to realise that the way we organised our work was itself creating limitations, waste, and slowness.
People were focused on completing their own tasks without seeing the entire flow of value creation. Teams could be extremely busy without being highly effective. Work was waiting everywhere, decisions had to pass through multiple layers, and much of people’s potential was not yet being fully realised.
That was when we began our journey with Open Management. [Open Management is the approach developed by Teal Unicorn, derived from global best practices in modern agile management https://tealunicorn.com/om/ .]
The first thing we changed was not the organisational structure, but the way we looked at the system, our people, and their ability to respond. We did not want people simply to perform their assigned tasks well. We wanted them to be able to see problems, contribute ideas, take initiative, and share responsibility for results.
As a result, we changed our organisational structure accordingly, moving from five small companies plus a central system into One Golden. From an organisation with a clear hierarchical structure, Golden gradually became more flexible, allowing people to “flow” across different work, projects, and teams based on their capabilities and where they could create the greatest value.
Just one year after improving the way we worked and managed the organisation, the results Golden achieved far exceeded our initial expectations. Revenue increased by 5–8%, profit increased by 80%, while labour productivity, measured per employee, increased by 110%.
More importantly, these results were also shared back with our people. All employees received an additional bonus equivalent to three months’ salary, while outstanding employees received an additional four to five months’ salary. In the years that followed, both business results and employee income continued to increase significantly.
These results showed us that changing the way an organisation is structured and the way work is done is not simply about creating a new management approach. It can lead to very tangible improvements in productivity, business performance, and the value an organisation creates for its people.
But the deeper we went into this journey, the more we realised that organisational improvement has no end point. So we continued to develop Open Management to keep pace with the development of our people, our work, and the market.
New Questions Emerged
Golden now has 109 people working across seven Micro Enterprises, a significant reduction from the 175 employees we had before the transformation began. With a leaner organisation but many projects still running simultaneously, new questions continued to emerge.
How can someone know who has the capacity to take on more work? How can one team know what is happening in other teams? How can leaders see what is actually happening without constantly asking people and consolidating information from different places?
We realised that for an organisation to truly become Open, with self-managing teams, it first needs to make information visible. If information is scattered across emails, spreadsheets, different tools, and the minds of a few people, it is very difficult for people to make decisions independently.
So, we did not only develop people’s capabilities and change the way we worked; we also built an information and data system to enable greater transparency. We developed an HRIS system and dashboards using data from the tools people already use every day, such as Outlook and Planner, combined with other necessary data.
Today, instead of having to ask individuals or leaders to find out who is available, who is overloaded, or who could join a new project, we can see this information through an Availability Calendar.
Information about projects, contracts, people, and revenue is also more connected and visible. Information that previously took a great deal of time to consolidate can now be seen more quickly, giving people a better basis for making decisions.
For us, this is not simply about moving all our data into a new system. It is another step in Open Management: when information becomes visible, autonomy has a real opportunity to become an organisational capability.
Applying the Micro Enterprise Model
After participating in ZeroDX in 2025, I was inspired by Haier’s Micro Enterprise model and began thinking about how we could apply this model at Golden.
We gradually organised Golden into seven Micro Enterprises, giving each group greater autonomy, capability to organise its work, and responsibility for its results. Each Micro Enterprise is not only responsible for delivering the work, but also has the ability to organise itself to create the greatest value for its customers. P&L is also made more visible at both project and Micro Enterprise level, helping teams better understand the value they create, the costs they use, and the results they achieve.
The most visible change is that customers can receive value faster and better, while our people are becoming more capable and better able to organise their own work. For us, Micro Enterprise is not simply a way of dividing up the organisation. It is the next step in building a Golden where teams can have greater autonomy, stay closer to customers, and take direct responsibility for the value they create.
Building the Capability for Autonomy
We also realised something else: we cannot expect people to self-manage if we do not help them develop the capabilities to do so.
Therefore, alongside changing the way we organise work, Golden continued to develop the Teal ShuHaRi capability framework. [ShuHaRi as used by Teal Unicorn is the technique for modelling team skills https://tealunicorn.com/our-shu-ha-ri-technique/ ]
This means that we do not manage people through job descriptions or assessments by their managers. Everyone has the opportunity to participate in identifying the capabilities their team needs, then assess their own capabilities and those of their colleagues, take part in 360-degree feedback, and build their own development path.
Teal ShuHaRi is structured as follows: Shu is learning and mastering foundational practices. Ha is understanding the principles, adapting, and improving. Ri is when a person has developed sufficient capability to act autonomously, innovate, and continuously create better ways of working.
What we are trying to build through this is not a system for ranking people. We want each person to understand where they are, what they need to develop, and how they can become increasingly capable of managing their own work, solving problems, and creating greater value.
Creating Value Together for Customers
Another important change for Golden has been the way we think about customers. Customers are not simply the people who sign contracts with us. Each team also has its own “customers”: this could be a colleague, another team, or the person who receives the outcome of their work.
Therefore, completing one’s own task is no longer seen as the end point. The more important question is: What value has this work created for the next person in the flow and ultimately for the customer? As people began to see work as a flow of value rather than simply their individual responsibilities, the boundaries between departments also became less important.
This is also why we continue to use practices such as Value Stream Mapping, Kanban, and short meetings that allow people to see the work, identify bottlenecks, and solve problems together rather than simply passing work from one department to another.
Continuous Improvement
A truly Open organisation cannot change only when leaders ask it to. Therefore, we are working to make learning and improvement part of our everyday operating rhythm.
Teams have short stand-ups to align on priorities and identify what is getting in the way of their work. Each week, people reflect on the value they have created, what worked, what did not, and what should be prioritized next. Deeper reflection cycles take place periodically, together with capability assessments through ShuHaRi.
This has created a change that I consider particularly important: improvement is no longer a “project” initiated by leaders; it has become the way we work. When someone sees a problem and has the capability to solve it, they do not necessarily have to wait for a leader to identify it and assign them a task. When a team sees an opportunity, they can experiment. When a way of working does not work, we can reflect together and change it.
That is the capability for continuous learning and improvement that we are building at Golden.
The Role of Leadership Has Changed
All of these changes ultimately come back to one question: What is leadership for?
In the past, I thought a leader was someone who had to know the most, make the most decisions, and exercise the most control. Now I think differently. The role of leadership is not to become the person who decides everything, but to provide direction, context, transparency, and the conditions that enable others to do their work well. When people have information, capability, and the authority to act, they no longer need leaders standing behind them, pushing every task forward.
Leaders can then spend their time on more important things: looking ahead, developing the organisation, and creating the conditions for the whole system to become better. That is a very significant shift in the way we understand leadership.
The Future We Want to Create
Looking back on this journey, I am proud of how much Golden has changed. But what I am most proud of is not that we have built an “Open” organisational model. It is that Golden is gradually developing the ability to learn, act, and continuously improve itself.
The results we have achieved over the years have given us greater confidence that when people are given more information, capability, autonomy, and opportunities to create value, an organisation can achieve more through a leaner way of operating. But we also understand that today’s results are not the destination.
We still have to continuously rebuild and relearn. Things that were once appropriate may no longer be appropriate. New challenges will emerge, and Golden will have to continue changing to adapt to them.
Therefore, the future we want to build is not simply a more efficient Golden or one with better business results. We want to build an organisation where people create greater value together for customers and society, share the results they create, and become happier and more prosperous together.