A country manager who writes down what he got wrong, and shows people who work and study for a master's degree how to do the same.
For most people who work and study at the same time, the gap is not knowledge. The gap is the system that connects what they learn in class to what they decide at work.
The major frameworks of professional development have shaped scholarly understanding for more than forty years. Kolb's experiential learning cycle (1984) describes how learners convert experience into knowledge. Argyris and Schön's organizational learning theory (1978) distinguishes the surface-level adjustment of single-loop learning from the deeper assumption-shifting of double-loop learning. Mezirow's transformative learning theory (1991) explains how mental frames change. Mintzberg's model of managing (2009) offers a comprehensive picture of what real managers actually do. These frameworks rarely show up on a Monday morning when the person who studied them on Saturday has to make a real decision at work, under real constraints.
Dr. Phuong Nguyen has spent thirty years inside exactly those decisions. He has built and led country teams across Vietnam, Cambodia, and Myanmar, including fifteen years at Johnson & Johnson. He has launched and relaunched brands that became market leaders across the region. He coaches his managers at work, and most of what he knows about learning comes from watching what they keep and what they lose. Alongside the P&L, he earned a Six Sigma Green Belt at Johnson & Johnson, developed as a marketing excellence trainer, and completed the Korn Ferry leadership programs that shaped a generation of Asian managers.
In parallel, he has spent six years inside doctoral seminars in Paris and Vietnam, and, as a Visiting Lecturer at CFVG, eight years observing senior managers across nine Executive MBA cohorts. The Discerning Practice Model emerged from that intersection: a recognition that people who work and study at the same time live a fragmented dual-track life, and that the integration of academic study and professional work, structurally promised by graduate education, rarely happens automatically.
The Discerning Practice Model is what survived. It is the practice, distilled.
Centre Franco-Vietnamien de Formation à la Gestion · May 2017 to Present
Eight years observing senior managers across nine Executive MBA cohorts, and one of the school's longest-serving visiting lecturers. Also serves as Thesis Advisor and Thesis Defense Examiner in the MBA Program.
What the cohorts asked for, in their own evaluations: across eight course evaluations from 2017 to 2025, 118 of 127 respondents rated the balance of theory and practice as right. Of roughly 300 open-text responses, two asked for more theory. Every other request for change asked for more applied work, or more time to do it in. The Discerning Practice Model is built on that request.
Audiences include MBA and specialized master's programs, corporate leadership teams, professional associations, and industry conferences across Asia-Pacific.
For speaking invitations, write to phuong@drpnguyen.com.
As Thesis Advisor at CFVG School of Management, Dr. Nguyen has guided MBA candidates through to successful defense across a range of topics in healthcare marketing, consumer behavior, and service quality:
Four questions, in your own words, on paper or in a document of your own. One prompt arrives by email every Friday at 07:00 GMT+7. Fifteen minutes to start. Thirty when you have them. The practice is free and stays free.
Start the free weekly practice