“Repatriating EMERGE Concepts and Practices from Vietnam for Innovative Public Leadership Approaches in Portland and Oregon”

Phyusin Myint and Marcus Ingle

Abstract:

As a direct result of the “wickedness of globalization, twenty-first century community leaders in Portland and Oregon confront a new class of dynamic and complex challenges and opportunities.   Issues such as air and water pollution, climate change, terrorism, natural resource depletion and the energy crisis require public and non-profit organizations, universities and businesses to pay immediate attention to long-term solution seeking strategies. If public institutions are to best serve the public good, leaders and managers must begin to find ways of better aligning leadership work with our longer-term demands for sustainable prosperity and security.  These ways must include an exploration of how governance can improve performance in anticipating emergent risks, trends and opportunities, to prepare for our society to adapt, evolve and prosper in the face of uncertainty in our age of complex interdependence. This paper is grounded upon a conceptual framework, based on the EMERGE public leadership framework adapted from the collaborative work between the Ho Chi Minh Academy and Portland State University, to identify distinct attributes unique to the Vietnamese context which we hypothesize can be repatriated and applied in the Oregon leadership context to improve our local community’s prosperity and security. The paper will review how practices from the Vietnamese contemporary context can be integrated into the common practices and concepts of public officials in Oregon to inform and strengthen practical leadership knowledge and action. Using several case illustrations, the paper will present hypotheses for the appropriateness of these cases in Oregon. These are preliminary and small applications and research is required to examine the relevance of these practices in broader setting and how they can best be integrated with contemporary public leadership and management practice.

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