Business as Unusual — Rick Yvanovich

Rick Yvanovich arrived in Vietnam in 1990, posted by BP as a Finance Manager. When the company wanted to send him back to London four years later, he chose to stay. In 1994 he founded TRG International, which grew over the following three decades into a technology and professional services firm serving over a thousand enterprises across eighty countries, staffed by 250 Vietnamese consultants and developers. He became one of the longest-established British business figures in the country.

By 2023, Yvanovich had built a substantial public profile in Vietnam through speaking engagements, his role on the BritCham Vietnam board, his position as chairman of RMIT Vietnam’s Industry Advisory Committee, and his work as an executive coach and mentor. He was already the author of a book in English. The missing piece was Vietnamese-language presence: a permanent, publishable record of his thinking that could reach the Vietnamese business community he had been working alongside for more than three decades.

Metro Writers was engaged to translate and produce the Vietnamese edition of Business as Unusual in partnership with Phuc Hung Books, who handled the layout, and World Publisher, Vietnam’s official state publishing house, which gave the edition its commercial standing in the Vietnamese market.

The Vietnamese edition did what Yvanovich intended. Published under a respected state imprint, translated into the language of his adopted home market, and distributed through established channels, it positioned him not merely as a foreign expert operating in Vietnam but as a contributor to Vietnamese business literature – a distinction that carries weight in a market where authority is partly established through exactly this kind of credential.

Thirty years of building business in Vietnam. One book to speak to the people who built it with him.

The COVID-19 pandemic did not merely disrupt business – it permanently shifted the assumptions on which professional life had been built. For Rick Yvanovich, a British entrepreneur who has been operating in Vietnam since 1990 and built TRG International into one of the country’s most established technology and professional services firms, the upheaval was also an opportunity to put into writing what three decades of building businesses in one of the world’s most dynamic markets had taught him.

Business as Unusual is organised around the metaphor of a castle, an inner architecture of purpose, resilience, mindset, and relationships that a leader must construct before any external ambition can be sustained. Drawing on Yvanovich’s experience across IT, talent management, F&B, property development, and executive coaching, and on his work with clients in over eighty countries, the book provides frameworks for setting goals, managing energy, building high-performance teams, and navigating change. It is part leadership manual, part coaching guide, and part personal manifesto from a practitioner who has spent four decades doing the thing he writes about.

The Vietnamese edition, produced in partnership with Phuc Hung Books and published by World Publisher in 2023, was translated by Metro Writers and makes Yvanovich’s thinking available to Vietnamese business readers for the first time – in the market where his career began.

One cause for dissatisfaction in life is a lack of progress. When we aren’t actively moving forward, we feel we are failing or merely drifting. When we feel stuck professionally, we aren’t taking steps towards becoming the person we want to be. We aren’t growing.

What underscores a lack of progress is universal: Purpose. Lack of progress in both life and business is generally due to a lack of personal purpose. Without purpose, we stall on our projects, procrastinate, get hung up or consumed by minor details, get frustrated more easily, and further disconnect from our support systems.

Purpose brings clarity, direction, measurable goals, and growth. Arguably, the Tower of Purpose is the tallest Tower in the Inner Keep, as it acts as your guide, compass, and north star. It needs to be visible above the treetops to guide you on your journey.

— Rick Yvanovich, Business as Unusual