Mekong Capital culture

ACCESS TO BREAKTHROUGH PERFORMANCE

The journey to a robust culture began.

In the beginning, we did not have any activities to engage our team members; rather we focused on giving our team knowledge and technical skills. Then when Mekong Capital started expanding rapidly, the lack of internal connection and clear communication resulted in everyone working in silos, lots of fighting, and office politics. In the end, few or no people saw themselves as responsible for any results, and everyone had an explanation that it was someone else’s fault. Therefore, in December 2007, we engaged in a transformation journey to deliver fully on our potential.

But it was quite challenging...

People who weren’t excited about the new culture left the company. It was also an opportunity for us to attract new talents who were very interested in the new future and culture we were building. As we started to identify what core values were important to us and build our culture around those core values, more and more team members began to take ownership, see the value, and support this transformation.

By 2010, our transformation process was complete. Anyone who wasn’t excited about the new culture had left the company. And new joiners at that time were those who were attracted to the new future and culture that we were building. Over the years, we have built a stable and well-balanced team, strongly empowered by our core values to deliver breakthrough results to Mekong Capital and our investee companies.

Mekong Capital core values

We continued to reinvent core values.

We continuously re-discover our core values towards the fulfillment of our vision. Now we have eight core values precisely targeted at what kinds of behaviors lead to results.

To make the cultural transition more familiar to the employees, we actively organize training courses and programs so that new employees can discover the core values for themselves and practice them in their work.

Mekong Capital with 8 core values
GenesisResultershipBeautegritySpringthroughCommunipleteInquisitySkydomGrowthset

Genesis

We choose the view of life that we are the source of who we are, what we choose, what actions we take, and what results we have. We are being the cause rather than the effect.

Resultership

We start from, and organize around, committed breakthrough outcomes in the future: Vision is paramount. Thus, we allocate our time, attention, and energy to where we add the most value and have the biggest impact on our committed outcome.

Beautegrity

Our integrity is the foundation for workability. We honor our word so that everything works. When we make a promise or commit to a target, others can rely on us to take the necessary actions to ultimately deliver the promised results on time.

Springthrough

Starting from committed breakthrough results, we cause new ways of being and occurring in which new actions and new results happen. We are not constrained by what we already know, rather we inquire what lead to breakthroughs in actions and results.

Communiplete

We communicate in a complete and direct way so that nothing is in the way, misunderstood or unhandled. We get the other person and are being gotten.

Inquisity

We relentlessly pull for the big picture or vision, intentions, root causes and key drivers. We ask questions of ourselves and others that lead to penetrating insights and discoveries which clarify the intention or transform our understanding of what we are dealing with.

Skydom

We give ourselves and others the space to discover for themselves and make their own choices, including giving them the space to struggle through it.

Growthset

Starting from an authentic commitment to deliver growth and breakthroughs, when we are not on track for a result to which we are committed, we pull for it as an opportunity for breakthroughs in performance.

Our culture enables us to fulfill our personal commitments in life.

To ensure harmony and balance between work-related commitments and personal commitments, we created a space for our shared personal commitments, which we call Personal Purposes. We empower each other and even create shared opportunities for all our employees to realize their personal commitments in life.

Our culture also enables us to deliver breakthrough results consistently.

Along the way, many of our investee companies noticed the change that happened within Mekong Capital, and they wanted something similar for themselves. Most notably, Mobile World was able to transform its culture over a single year. Starting with the strong commitment of the five co-founders of Mobile World, they cascaded down to build a culture of integrity and customer focus. And this culture still runs very deep in Mobile World, being embodied by its 40,000+ employees.

During this journey, we discovered that the performance of Mekong Capital, and ultimately the performance of our investee companies, starts with who are being and how we empower the success of each other and our investee companies. Therefore, standing in our shared commitment to each of our investee achieving their visions, we have designed our involvement in such a way that our investee companies take actions to create for themselves ways of looking at things that lead to breakthroughs in performance necessary for their vision to be achieved.

And unfold more transformation in our investee companies.

Entobel team

Entobel team

But it wasn’t easy at first. Many of our investee companies had a view that the core values were outside of their urgent priorities – they would get around to them eventually. Often, employees were of the view that the core values were aspirational, or for marketing purposes, not that it was their job to apply the core values in their actions every day.

Through much trial and error, we learned to work closely with our investee companies to coach them to develop their corporate cultures around their core values and empower them to practice applying their core values. The more that a company’s management team practices the application of core values in their day-to-day actions, the more they will see that it works and will keep doing it. Since then, we continued to re-invent our interactions with our investee companies to be much more powerful and impactful, which leads to our investee companies’ performance has improved significantly.

Mekong Capital Recruitment

Meet the team

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