A Preface to the People-Centered Economy for the People of Vietnam It is an honor to write this preface to the Vietnamese translation of the People Centered Economy. My good friend and colleague, Dr. Sung Nguyen, who translated the book, has introduced me to the history and culture of Vietnam and it is in that context that the preface is written. Too often it is assumed that economies are the product of businesses and that private sector businesses are all about maximizing profits and shareholder values. These themes lead to efforts to reduce cost and increase profit by executing tasks more efficiently or by automating some of them to eliminate or reduce the cost of labor. The maximization of shareholder value, while a popular idea introduced in the 1980s, has the unfortunate consequence of discounting or ignoring the value of many of the people whose work makes a company valuable. In this book, a primary theme is that we should be maximizing the value of people rather than reducing the cost of task completion. Done well, we may even achieve both objectives at the same time. There is a long history of distinguishing "owners" and "workers." Sometimes this goes along with the distinction between "management" and "labor" although not all managers are necessarily owners (shareholders). In this book, I hope you will discover that the well-being of a workforce is strongly associated with its sense of self-value and value to the company. Compensation is an important component of satisfaction, and a component of that should be literally sharing in the ownership of the company whose value is increased by the work of its employees. There exist companies that are "employee-owned." Cooperatives are another form in which the participants share in the value of the organization. Publicly traded companies often offer shares of the company to employees at a discount or include shares of the company as part of a compensation package. Such arrangement