A senior strategy executive at a Fortune 100 company recently asked researcher Zak Dychtwald a question I have heard, in one form or another, in boardrooms from Singapore to San Francisco: "Do the teams in Asia just struggle with speaking up?"
It sounds reasonable. It is even, as Dychtwald writes in a new Harvard Business Review piece, a well-informed question, rooted in real observations about indirect communication in many Asian workplaces. But when he compared the company's headquarters with its largest Asia-based team, the data told a different story. Collaboration was breaking down at the level of systems, not culture.
That single finding should be required reading for every multinational operating in Vietnam, and every Vietnamese company dreaming of going the other way.
Seven Elements, And Where Leaders Waste Their Energy
Dychtwald's research, spanning years of surveys, leadership interviews, and workshops with Fortune 500 companies and Chinese tech giants, identifies seven elements that determine how well global teams work. Three of them are what he calls friction amplifiers: time zones, language, and country culture. You can manage them, but you can never really change them. Someone always takes the 5:00 AM call. The colleague arguing in her first language always has an edge over the one working in his second, even when his analysis is sharper.
The other four are trust-and-alignment multipliers: HQ-region power dynamics, company culture, market knowledge, and process. These can be changed through intentional design. And here is the mistake most leaders make: they pour energy into the frictions they cannot control while ignoring the levers they can.
The most damning pattern in the research is what happens when you ask HQ and regional teams to rate trust and influence separately. Regional teams report high trust, they feel respected, but low influence, they feel underpowered. In that environment, influence flows to whoever advocates best for themselves, not whoever reads the market best. The loudest voice wins, not the wisest.
The Bridge People Are Already Here
The part of the article that hit closest to home is Dychtwald's portrait of "bridge people." He describes a regional leader who works two shifts: 9:00 to 6:00 doing the job she was hired for, then 6:00 to midnight doing the one nobody sees, explaining her market to a headquarters that has rarely visited it, justifying decisions, translating directives into something her team can execute.
If you have spent any time in the offices of multinationals in Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi, you know these people. They are the country managers who spend evenings on calls with Europe or the US. The marketing leads rewriting global campaigns that would fall flat here. The finance directors explaining, for the fourth time, why a playbook designed in Chicago does not map onto Vietnamese distribution. Dychtwald calls the sum of this invisible labor the global-collaboration tax, and his data shows the cost: attrition among bridge people runs roughly twice that of their domestic peers.
Vietnam should care about this because we are producing bridge people at scale. They are among our most internationally fluent, commercially valuable professionals, and the current system quietly burns them out. The instinct at most companies is to treat them as employees who need to toughen up. Dychtwald's answer is that the system is what's broken, and the bridge people are simply absorbing the friction it creates.
Vietnam's Global-team Moment
This matters now because Vietnam's role in global companies is changing. For decades, the country plugged into multinationals as a production site. Increasingly, it hosts real functions: regional marketing, engineering, product, shared services. Global capability centers that once defaulted to India or the Philippines are giving Vietnam a serious look. That means more Vietnamese teams sitting inside global org charts, more 9:00 PM calls, more strategy decks translated in both directions.
The question is whether headquarters will treat these teams as execution arms or as strategy inputs. Dychtwald's Fortune 100 executive noticed that almost none of his company's strategy originated in Asia despite the region generating so much of the world's disruptive innovation. Swap in Vietnam and the observation still holds. A market this young, this digital, and this fast-moving should be feeding insight upstream. If the pipes for that insight do not exist, if strategic input is not in anyone's formal remit, the company is winging it, and the market intelligence walks out the door with every departing bridge person.
There is a mirror lesson for Vietnamese companies going abroad. As our own firms expand into Southeast Asia and beyond, we risk repeating the exact HQ sins the article catalogs: exporting a Saigon office culture built on unwritten rules, holding decision rights hostage to headquarters' waking hours, treating overseas teams as messengers rather than minds. Company culture, Dychtwald notes, rarely travels well. "Do the right thing" means something different in every market. Vietnamese companies will need to translate their culture explicitly, not assume it transfers.
What To Actually Do
The article's prescriptions are refreshingly concrete. Map yourself honestly on the seven elements. Design decision rights region by region, defining what input is advisory and what is determinative, before a crisis forces the question. Systematize market knowledge at HQ through reverse briefings and knowledge hubs, so learning stops depending on heroic individuals. Cut global meetings by 20 to 25 percent and confine them to Monday through Wednesday. And put bridging work into performance reviews and promotion criteria, because the person on the 11:00 PM call does not owe anyone a 9:00 AM start.
None of this is exotic. That is precisely the point. The barriers to global collaboration feel cultural and immovable, but the highest-leverage fixes are operational and entirely within a leadership team's control.
Dychtwald closes with a line worth pinning above every regional office door: culture shapes how cross-geography collaboration feels; operating design determines whether it wins. Vietnam's talent has already proven it can carry the weight of global work. The companies that redesign the system around them, instead of asking why they don't speak up, will be the ones that win here.
By Hao Tran | Commentary on "How Highly Effective Global Teams Collaborate Across Cultures" by Zak Dychtwald, HBR, July 2026