TTD Journal
Real case studies about people in organisations, lessons from the craft and new research. Every piece is fully sourced, every photo credited, and each ends with something you can apply in a Vietnamese workplace.
Since June 2026, EU countries have been required to put a new set of pay rules into national law: candidates learn the pay range before the interview, workers can ask for average pay by sex, and a 5 percent gap has to be explained.
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Gallup's 2026 report records a second consecutive annual fall in engagement. The striking part is not the headline number but which group fell fastest: the very people asked to lift everyone else's engagement.
Three researchers had interviewers talk to candidates who answered at random. The interviewers' confidence did not drop at all. That is why unstructured interviews survive, even though the data says they make hiring decisions worse.
Most arguments about remote work rest on how the arguer feels. A Chinese travel company ran two randomised controlled trials a decade apart, and the results do not land neatly on either side.
Vietnam's 2025 Employment Law took effect at the start of this year. Three changes land directly on HR's daily work: who must pay unemployment insurance, what employees receive, and a new labour registration duty with penalties attached.
To keep production lines running through the fourth COVID wave, thousands of southern Vietnamese employers moved workers into their factories. Weeks later, 1.3 million people rode home on motorbikes. It belongs in the history of HR in Vietnam.
180 teams, hundreds of variables, and a hypothesis that great teams are the sum of great people. The hypothesis was wrong. The real answer had been found in a hospital by a doctoral student twenty years earlier.
Deloitte, Adobe and GE each abandoned the old-style annual review, each for a different reason. Put side by side, the three stories show HR which parts of an appraisal process actually earn their keep.
After the first week of training, Zappos gave every new hire a choice: stay, or take the money and go. It sounds wasteful until you set it against the cost of someone who stays without wanting to.
Netflix's 2009 culture deck has been copied by thousands of companies. Few mention that its co-author was let go under her own rule, or that Netflix employees themselves have described its dark side.
In 1940 America had to turn farmhands and homemakers into aircraft workers in weeks. The method it came up with fitted on a pocket card, and it is still the best way to coach a job that many factories have never used.
Amazon wanted a system that rated CVs from one to five stars, the way shoppers rate products. The system did exactly what it was taught, and that is why it failed.
Satya Nadella is usually credited with bringing the growth mindset to Microsoft. The full story starts earlier, with a ranking curve being dismantled, and includes a moment when he had to apologise in public.
The assembly line let Ford build a Model T in 93 minutes, but it could not keep the people standing beside it. The 1914 fix is famous for the wage. The part rarely told is the conditions attached.
For nearly a century, management students were taught that workers do better simply because someone is paying attention. Then two economists found the original data everyone assumed had been destroyed.
A Harvard and BCG experiment found AI made people faster and better, until they hit a task outside its abilities. There, AI users did worse than people without it. Knowing where that line lies is a skill, and skills have to be taught.
For the first time in five years, average learning hours per employee rose while spend per person fell sharply. Walmart is the clearest example of how both can happen at once, and of what needs measuring next.
Deloitte's 2026 Human Capital Trends report has a number worth pinning up in every AI project room. Klarna's story shows what that number looks like in real life.
LinkedIn Learning's reports have repeatedly ranked learning opportunities as the most-used retention strategy. The restaurant chain Chipotle shows what that looks like in numbers, in an industry notorious for high turnover.
Vietnam is shifting its focus from qualifications to occupational skills. The American experience shows that deleting a line from a job description is the easiest part, and the least effective.
TalentLMS's 2026 L&D survey records the highest level of multitasking during training in three years. A 2013 experiment in Canada shows the cost falls not only on the person with the laptop open.
Vietnam aims to train millions of digital workers and at least 50,000 university-level semiconductor staff. Sixteen years ago, opening its largest chip assembly and test plant in Ho Chi Minh City, Intel faced exactly this problem, and it started with the lecturers.
The most-cited report on the future of work is also the most miscited. The number to remember is not the net 78 million jobs but the gap between who gets reskilled and who does not. AT&T once faced exactly that gap.
The World Economic Forum's reskilling initiative is closing in on a billion people. Singapore, where every citizen has been given money to learn since 2016, is a reminder that access and use are two different numbers.
