Our Amazing Classmate Kien Pham
Joe Tye
In 1996, I put on a conference and asked our classmate Kien Pham to attend to receive our Never Fear Never Quit Award for exhibiting courage and perseverance. He brought with him a print of the Chinese symbol for crisis, which is comprised of two ideograms – one meaning danger and the other meaning opportunity. For me, those two things capture the essence of Kien Pham: the courage to confront the danger in every crisis and the perseverance to transform that danger into opportunity.
Kien grew up in Saigon during what we know as the Vietnam War (and which in Vietnam is remembered as the American War). One of his earliest memories was at the age of five visiting his Uncle Kham, a Vietnamese special forces officer, who had been imprisoned by the Diem regime. Ten years later, when the army of North Vietnam rolled into Saigon, Kien’s father, as an official of the government of South Vietnam, was sent off to prison. Upon his release two years later, the family was sent off to the Mekong Delta where they were to become rice farmers. After two more years of careful planning, Kien led the family on a harrowing escape on an overcrowded fishing boat; it was their seventeenth attempt. Joining an exodus that claimed the lives of as many as 400,000 of his fellow boat people, they spent a brutal one hundred days on the open seas. Approaching the coastlines of several countries only be to pushed back out to sea again, they finally landed in Malaysia where they spent the next several years in a refugee camp. Through connections his father had made during the war, and a refugee relief program expanded by Jimmy Carter, they eventually made their way to Colorado where Kien learned to speak English at night while working in a factory during the day.
Just seven years later Kien, now fluent in English and a college graduate, joined our class at the GSB. He was the first Vietnamese student ever to have been admitted to the school. If you didn’t really get to know Kien during our two years on The Farm, it is because while we were working on our MBAs (and attending Friday afternoon LPFs and nocturnal meetings of the Friends of Arjay) Kien was working on a second master’s degree in international economics. Following graduation, he went to Washington D.C. as a White House Fellow in the Reagan administration. Kien was the first Vietnamese-born person ever to earn this position. In recognition of his government service, Kien has received the White House Legacy of Leadership Award and the Secretary of Defense Achievement Award for his work in building coalition support for the 1991 Gulf War.
Following his government service work (which never really ended even after he entered the private sector) Kien went to work for Tenneco, which at the time was floundering and at risk of failing. He had been personally recruited by the new CEO to help save the company. Though he had already accepted a job with GE and was headed for Singapore, he changed his mind when he learned of the magnitude of the challenge, and the consequences for our nation, if Tenneco collapsed.
In 1997 Kien took a two-year personal sabbatical to work for the freedom of political prisoners in Vietnam. At significant personal risk he returned to Vietnam to conduct interviews and negotiations, and eventually helped to free more than four hundred prisoners from labor camps and facilitated their emigration to the United States. During his prisoner interviews there was always a box of tissues on the table. Knowing that was where the secret police kept the bug that was recording the conversation, Kien would drum his fingers across the box. Within a minute or so the box would be replaced by another just like it – and placed just beyond Kien’s reach.
In 2001, Kien led an alumni group of White House Fellows on a trip to Vietnam. While there they interviewed General Vo Nguyen Giap, the military genius who had engineered victories over the French and Americans. When they asked what the U.S. could do that would be most helpful in rebuilding Vietnam, Giap simply replied, “Educate my people.” Upon returning to the States, Kien established the Vietnam Education Foundation (VEF) as a government-sponsored program to bring Vietnamese graduate students to the U.S. to study, with a commitment that they would return to Vietnam and apply what they had learned to the rebuilding of their nation. For the most part, these were children of the government and military officials who not that long before had imprisoned Kien’s father and exiled his family. To date more than six hundred Vietnamese students have studied at U.S. graduate schools.
I recall one time when Kien and I were walking around the Stanford campus. Standing at the fountain near the bookstore, I asked him how, after all the harm that had been caused to his family, he could now work so hard on behalf of the country from which his family had been forced to flee with nothing more than the clothes on their backs. I will never forget his response. He simply said that hatred is a reaction and forgiveness is a decision, and that he had chosen to forgive rather than to hate.
Kien invited me to attend one of the very first VEF meetings, which was held in his D.C. apartment. As I recall there were nine students in the group there to join in a conversation about leadership. I started by asking for an example of an admired leader. A hand shot up and one of the VEF Fellows shouted, Ho Chi Minh! I looked over at Kien who just sat there with his Cheshire Cat grin. Yes, I replied, Ho Chi Minh was a great leader, and then asked for another example. A second hand shot up: Ho Chi Minh! After several more “Ho Chi Minh” responses, Kien rescued me by suggesting that we move on and talk about the principles that define great leaders like Ho Chi Minh.
Several years later Kien asked me to return for another VEF event, this time in California. The VEF Fellows group had grown to be more than a hundred Vietnamese graduate students. Following the event that evening, I asked Kien about his future plans. He told me that he intended to return to Vietnam to help build the telecommunications infrastructure that would be crucial to that nation’s further development. I was astonished, but should not have been surprised, by the audacity of his new dream. Within the next several years Kien was CEO and Vice Chairman of Vietnam Net Media Group, that nation’s leading media, internet, and entertainment company.
One evening Kien called me from Vietnam. He told me that one of his VEF Fellows named Hung Tran would be attending the University of Iowa to earn a PhD in computer science. I was, he instructed, to do three things: give Hung a job at Values Coach, keep him out of the notorious Iowa City bars, and make sure that he graduated early and with straight A’s. Today Hung is Founder and VP of Engineering of GotIt!, a high tech company with offices in Silicon Valley and Hanoi, one of the hundreds of young people who have been helped and inspired by Kien Pham. Hung’s cubicle in our offices at Values Coach, where the idea for GotIt! company was first formulated, has since been occupied by several other successful VEF Fellows – and will always be available for the next one.
In 2016, I joined a group of GSB classmates on one of the Vietnam excursions that Kien has hosted. In Saigon, we visited a school for the blind that is made possible by the sponsorship of Kien and his family. We also visited Xuan Son Primary School, which is supported by Kien’s family in a small village that was once part of North Vietnam, and had lunch at the home of a man who had been a general in the North Vietnamese Army. At a dinner in Saigon commemorating the 240th anniversary of the founding of the United States Marine Corps, Kien introduced us to the U.S. Ambassador. From the hallways of rural village Vietnamese schoolhouses to the halls of power in Saigon, we personally witnessed the respect and admiration that people hold for our classmate, from both of the two nations he calls home.
Last year Nancy Mancini interviewed Kien as part of the John W. Gardner Legacy Oral History Project. In that interview Kien described his leadership philosophy: “I often tell people that I see my role in the business world as a person who will do two things: Number one is to build a superior team, and number two is to motivate them. I think that’s the essence of leadership in the business world, maybe outside also.” He often speaks about what he calls the 3Ps of the Inner Compass: Purpose, Passion, and Principles.
As part of our GSB Vietnam journey we took a cruise on the Mekong River (which some forty years earlier had been the escape route for Kien and his family.) At dinner one evening the crew pulled out a karaoke machine. It was – how do I put this? – unmemorable. But when the microphone reached Kien, he belted out My Way, the song written by Paul Anka and made famous by Frank Sinatra. Over a lifetime of courage and perseverance, of love and forgiveness, Kien Pham has touched the lives of thousands–including his GSB classmates. And he’s done it his way.
In 1968 my father, a career U.S. Air Force officer, was sent to Vietnam. Dad almost never talked about his experience in Vietnam. He told us the closest he had come to real danger was almost being shot by his roommate when he surprised him by coming in late one evening. After Dad passed away, we found a bronze star in one of his drawers but nothing to explain what it was for.
Thirty-eight years after Dad landed at Tan Son Nhat airbase in Saigon on a troop transport, I flew into that airport in a much more comfortable Korean Air jetliner to join Kien Pham and a group of Stanford GSB classmates and significant others. Kien had asked me to give a short presentation for a group of young Vietnamese entrepreneurs the following morning. He met me at our hotel that evening to help me with final edits. I was quite proud of the fact that Hung Tran had taught me to say “Never Fear, Never Quit” in Vietnamese. After I parroted the phrase, Kien asked me to repeat it. Then he shook his head and with a smile said, “Please never say that in public.”
The next morning we walked over to the hotel where my presentation was to be. In the courtyard out front was a large statue of Ho Chi Minh. As we approached the front door, one of Kien’s colleagues put a hand on my shoulder and said, “I understand your father was an Air Force officer stationed here during the war.” I acknowledged the fact and he replied, “This hotel was the bachelor officers’ quarters where your father would have stayed.” I was stunned. The only picture I’d ever seen of Dad’s quarters had sandbags and a machine gun at the door and, of course, no statue of Ho Chi Minh out front.
After he retired from the Air Force, Dad pursued a successful second career as a professional artist. Had our nations’ histories evolved in a different way, instead of being checked by an armed military guard behind sandbags, Dad might one day have strolled past the statue of Ho Chi Minh into the hotel with a framed canvas under his arm.
When we flew into Hanoi, the capital city of what forty years earlier had been an enemy nation with which we were at war, all of the airport signs were in English as well as Vietnamese. As we strolled around the city one evening, I took a picture that for me captures the essence of Vietnam’s postwar transformation. That image raises the philosophical question of how the decisions made by a nation’s leaders will determine whether young men and women fly to other countries on jetliners to get to know the people they meet, or on troop transports to kill the people they meet.
Of all the pictures I took in Vietnam, my favorite is one of children waving Vietnamese and American flags at the Xuan Son Primary School. In my introduction I mentioned that Values Coach will always have a cubicle ready for a VEF Fellow. I will probably be long since retired should this ever happen, but I’d like to think that one day the little boy in the middle of this picture waving his arms with such an exuberant spirit of celebration will be that VEF Fellow and that, like Hung Tran and those who followed, he will go on to make a difference in the world. If that happens, that young man will be one more leader-in-the-making thanks to the work of our friend and GSB classmate Kien Pham.
