1. Overview and Aims

Despite decades of investment in project management education, certification, and methodology development, the global success rate of projects remains stubbornly low. As documented in Flyvbjerg and Gardner’s How Big Things Get Done (2023) — cited in the book’s opening pages — across a database of approximately 16,000 projects, only 8.5 percent met both their cost and schedule targets. Projects achieving all three objectives — cost, schedule, and intended benefits — represented just 0.5 percent.

Project Management: True Understanding, Genuine Action argues that this failure rate cannot be addressed by more methodology alone. It is the product of five chronic conditions: ego-centered thinking and personal bias; toxic project environments rooted in failed leadership; weak execution competence; shallow preparation and reckless management; and bureaucratic indifference. These conditions are not technical problems. They are human ones — ethical, cultural, and organizational in nature.

The book develops a systematic response to each of these conditions across twenty chapters organized into seven parts. Its framework integrates modern international project management methodology — PMBOK, PRINCE2, Earned Value Management, Agile, complex project management, AACE cost estimation classification, benefits realization management — with a philosophical tradition drawn from Vietnamese, Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist thought. The result is a book unlike any currently available in English-language project management literature.

The aims of the book are:

• To provide project practitioners with a rigorous, integrated framework for understanding why projects fail and what genuinely prevents failure — going beyond process compliance to the deeper conditions that determine project success.
• To introduce to international readers a body of Vietnamese, Confucian, and Buddhist thought that offers practical insight into leadership, ethics, culture, and adaptive management — applied directly to the project management context.
• To demonstrate, through twenty years of direct experience on major Vietnamese energy and infrastructure projects, that the principles developed in the book are not theoretical abstractions but hard-won practical conclusions.
• To contribute a distinctively Asian perspective to an international PM literature that has been dominated by North American and European frameworks — at a moment when the world’s most significant infrastructure development is occurring in Asia, Africa, and the Global South.

2. Synopsis

The book is organized into seven parts across twenty chapters, progressing from foundations to advanced practice and concluding with an integrative philosophical synthesis.

Part One: Foundations (Foreword, Chapter 1)

The Foreword frames the stakes: project management’s central paradox — a well-developed discipline with a poor success rate. Chapter 1, “Why Do Projects Fail?” identifies five chronic failure conditions and proposes five corresponding remedies that structure the remainder of the book.

Part Two: Professional Ethics (Chapters 2–3)

Chapters 2 and 3 develop the book’s ethical foundation. Chapter 2 examines the four core values of the PMI Code of Ethics (Responsibility, Respect, Fairness, Integrity) through Vietnamese case material: the Japanese delegation that bowed in collective acknowledgment of an error; the practitioner who faces pressure to bypass legal requirements. Chapter 3 explores ethical thinking and character development, centering on Ho Chi Minh as an exemplar of revolutionary ethics and examining the critical thinking frameworks — Paul and Elder’s ten intellectual standards — that enable ethical judgment.

Part Three: Project Culture (Chapters 4–6)

This part develops the concept of project culture through six pillars: values and purpose, leadership quality, professional ethics, talent development, methodology, and learning capacity. Chapter 5 examines cultural dynamics in international projects, drawing on Hofstede’s framework and direct observation. Chapter 6 introduces the Six Harmonies (Lục Hòa) from the Vietnamese Buddhist tradition as a practical framework for building cohesive, high-functioning project teams.

Part Four: Competency Development (Chapters 7–9)

The competency part grounds the book in technical depth. Chapter 7 presents a rich account of Vietnam’s own historical project management tradition — from the construction of Co Loa Citadel (third century BCE) to the Hue imperial city — before surveying the modern international competency frameworks (PMBOK, IPMA ICB, APM). Chapter 8 covers project management methodology selection, including Traditional, Agile, and Complex PM, with EVM, WBS, CPM, Monte Carlo simulation, and PRINCE2 components. Chapter 9 develops the book’s most original pedagogical contribution: a three-level taxonomy of knowledge — book knowledge, working knowledge, and living knowledge — drawn from Vietnamese philosopher Cao Huy Thuần, applied to the challenge of genuine professional development in PM.

Part Five: Organization and Leadership (Chapters 10–12)

Chapter 10 develops a model of project leadership drawing on eight qualities from the classical Vietnamese military text Binh Thư Yếu Lược, set against Shackleton’s Endurance expedition and contemporary leadership research. Chapters 11 and 12 examine organizational design and team capability development, including project culture assessment, Tuckman’s team formation model, mentoring, and the McKinsey 7-S and Galbraith Star organizational frameworks.

Part Six: Selection, Planning, and Risk (Chapters 13–15)

The book’s most technically intensive part opens with the story of the Manhattan Project as a case study in both project leadership and ethical complexity. Chapter 13 examines project selection methodology: investment analysis (NPV, IRR, PI), benefits realization management, and the structural causes of Vietnam’s persistent project cost overruns. Chapter 14 develops comprehensive project planning across scope, schedule, cost, and procurement — including the EPC vs. EPCM contract comparison developed by the author from direct experience. Chapter 15 covers risk management, contingency estimation, and schedule recovery, with AACE Class 1–5 estimate classification as the framework for understanding why early-phase cost estimates in Vietnam are systematically unreliable.

Part Seven: Adaptive Management and Conclusion (Chapters 16–20)

The book’s final part integrates the preceding material through a philosophical lens. Chapter 16 develops the Eightfold Noble Path as a framework for adaptive management — eight practices enabling clarity, stability, and wise response to the constant change that characterizes real projects. Chapters 17–19 address stakeholder management, organizational learning, and the recovery of troubled projects, with the Sydney Opera House and Vogtle 3&4 as extended case studies. Chapter 20, “True Understanding, Genuine Action,” brings the book to its conclusion through Tolstoy’s “The King’s Three Questions” — as interpreted by Thich Nhat Hanh — and the author’s distinctive teaching: “See the project — it is not a project — and so, truly see the project.”

3. Distinctive Contribution

The book makes three contributions that are, to the translator’s knowledge, without precedent in English-language project management literature:

(a) An Asian philosophical framework applied rigorously to PM practice

The integration of Buddhist, Confucian, Taoist, and Vietnamese philosophical tradition with modern project management methodology is not decorative or superficial. The Six Harmonies (Lục Hòa) are applied as a team-building framework with specific behavioral indicators. The Eightfold Noble Path is developed into an eight-practice adaptive management system directly mapped to PM challenges. The I Ching’s principle of “adapt to the time while holding to center and right” is the organizing logic of the book’s approach to project recovery and change management. This integration is systematic and practical — not philosophical decoration appended to a conventional PM textbook.

(b) A practitioner voice from Vietnam’s energy infrastructure sector

The author spent eighteen years directing PetroVietnam project management boards on facilities that now form a substantial portion of Vietnam’s installed power generation capacity. The book’s case material — the Japanese delegation’s bow of apology, the practitioner under political pressure to bypass procurement regulations, the ‘technical completion’ ceremony followed by months of unfinished work — is drawn from direct experience. No existing English-language PM book offers this perspective.

(c) The three-knowledge taxonomy

The distinction between book knowledge (kiến thắc suông), working knowledge (kiến thắc làm), and living knowledge (kiến thắc sống), developed through the Vietnamese philosopher Cao Huy Thuần, provides a genuinely original framework for understanding professional development in PM — and for explaining why certification alone does not produce capable practitioners. This taxonomy addresses a problem that is widely recognized in the PM community but for which the existing literature offers no comparably clear conceptual framework.

4. Target Audience

Primary audience

• Senior project management practitioners in energy, infrastructure, construction, and industrial sectors — particularly those working on large, complex projects in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America.
• Project management educators and trainers seeking a text that grounds methodology in ethics, culture, and the development of practitioner wisdom.
• Organizational leaders and project sponsors responsible for major capital investment programs who want to understand the human and cultural conditions for project success.

Secondary audience

• Students in postgraduate PM, engineering management, and MBA programs, particularly those with an interest in cross-cultural and Asian dimensions of management.
• Researchers in project management, organization studies, and Asian business with an interest in non-Western PM frameworks.
• PM practitioners and managers working in Vietnam or Southeast Asia who seek a culturally grounded perspective on the region’s project management challenges.

The book is written for practitioners, not academics. It assumes a working familiarity with project management concepts but does not require prior knowledge of Vietnamese culture or Buddhist philosophy — both are introduced and explained as the argument develops.

5. Competing and Related Titles

No existing English-language book occupies the same position as this one. The most relevant titles are those that share one of the book’s key dimensions, but none that share all of them:

On the ethics and human dimensions of project management

How Big Things Get Done — Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner (Currency/Random House, 2023). Influential on the failure statistics framing; analytically rigorous but focused on cognitive bias and planning fallacy, not on ethics or culture as primary variables. No Asian perspective.

The Oxford Handbook of Project Management — Morris, Pinto & Söderlund (eds.) (Oxford University Press, 2011). Authoritative academic reference; addresses ethics and culture as topics but not as integrative framework. No practitioner voice.

On leadership and culture in projects

Managing Complex, High Risk Projects — Marle & Vidal (Springer, 2015). Cited in the book; technically rigorous on complexity; European academic perspective, no cultural framework.

Project Leadership — Briner, Hastings & Geddes (Gower, 2012). Standard professional reference on project leadership; Western framework, no Eastern philosophical dimension.

On Eastern philosophy and management

The Tao of Leadership — Heider (Humanics, 1985). Applies Tao Te Ching to leadership; well-known but general and non-technical, not addressed to PM practitioners specifically.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance — Pirsig (William Morrow, 1974). Cultural touchstone for integrating Eastern philosophy with technical practice; not a PM book, but shares the structural ambition of bridging traditions.

On Vietnamese / Asian project management

No book currently in print addresses project management from a Vietnamese practitioner perspective, or integrates Vietnamese philosophical tradition with the discipline. The closest parallel in ambition — a non-Western PM perspective with genuine depth — is the growing body of work on ‘Ubuntu’ and African management philosophy, but this remains primarily academic and has not yet produced a practitioner-facing text of comparable scope.

The market position of this book is therefore genuinely uncontested: a practitioner-written, philosophically grounded, culturally specific contribution to PM literature from one of Asia’s most significant infrastructure development contexts.

6. About the Author

Truong Van Thien holds a Master of Science in Thermal Energy Engineering from the Belarusian National Technical University (1994). He spent eighteen years directing project management boards for PetroVietnam on major power generation facilities including the Ca Mau Gas-Power-Fertilizer Cluster (Ca Mau 1 & 2), the Quang Trach 1 Power Plant, and the Long Phu 1 Power Plant — projects representing billions of dollars of investment that now form a substantial part of Vietnam’s national energy supply. His career began as a design engineer and construction supervisor working alongside leading international consultants: Stone & Webster (USA), TEPSCO (Japan), Colenco and Poyry (Switzerland), Fichtner (Germany), and major contractors including Siemens, GE, and Power Machines.

He is currently Director of Vietnam Project Management Solutions and former Director of the Training and Research Development Center at Power Engineering Consulting Company No. 2 (PECC2, 2019–2025), where he led the annual PECC2 Vietnam Energy Outlook publication and coordinated research on emerging energy technologies including small modular reactors (SMR) in collaboration with SEABORG (Denmark), Siemens, VINATOM, and the IAEA.

He has published in Vietnam’s Petroleum Journal and in ICCPM Connect Magazine (Australia, February 2024: “Upskilling Project Talent in Vietnam”). In May 2024, he co-organized with ICCPM (International Centre for Complex Project Management, Australia) an international conference in Ho Chi Minh City: “Managing Complex Energy Projects: Challenges and Solutions.” He has received the Prime Minister’s Commendation (2007), the Labor Medal Third Class (2008), and the Outstanding Young Oil & Gas Manager Award (2007).

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Book Link: https://nxbxaydung.com.vn/quan-ly-du-an-hieu-dung-lam…