Charles Vogl has spent years teaching this at Google, Harvard, and Stanford. Here's what his July 23 workshop with us looks like

Why we brought in Charles Vogl

“The number one emotion entrepreneurs feel is not pride. It is loneliness.” That's Dave Hajdu, EO Vietnam's Marcom Chair and Founder and Chief AI Officer of Edge8, a firm that trains leadership teams across Southeast Asia and North America.

He's talking about people like EO Vietnam's own members, founders running seven-figure businesses who sit in rooms full of people every week. What Dave's pointing to is a specific kind of loneliness, the kind that comes from carrying decisions that few people around you can actually share.

Charles Vogl works on exactly that problem. He built the community practices behind Google's School for Leaders, a program that trains more than 20,000 managers, and is a founding member of Google's Vitality Lab. He has presented at Harvard, Stanford, and The Academy of Management, and has guest lectured across Yale departments since 2007. His book, The Art of Community, lays out seven principles that Airbnb, LinkedIn, and the US Army now use to build belonging inside their own organizations. He frames belonging as a business case as much as a personal one. Done well, it builds organizational resilience and keeps people around a shared purpose.

On July 23, he's leading that work as a live session with EO Vietnam, building directly on the leadership development work the chapter already does.

What the afternoon looks like

People remember little from watch-and-listen sessions packed with information, so Charles built his workshop with us around a small number of ideas, each given real time to land. It runs the better part of an afternoon, in one room, with less sitting and listening than a typical seminar and more time actually practicing the ideas with the people around you.

The room and the mic setup are built to keep the group in conversation throughout.

What belonging actually means

Charles's own path into this work started with an idea from C.S. Lewis: that everyone wants into some more exclusive circle, and chasing the next one never satisfies you. Lewis's fix was to find something worth doing and invite others into it. Charles built a career testing that idea inside the organizations he's worked with since.

His book breaks the result down into seven working parts: boundary, initiation, rituals, temple, stories, symbols, and inner rings. One of his central ideas is what he calls the crisis of belonging. It's the doubt people feel about whether they truly belong somewhere, even when every fact says they do. The antidote is mostly invitations that make someone feel chosen rather than cc'd, and small repeated moments that earn trust before anyone has to rely on it.

For a founder, the same parts show up outside any workshop. A new hire's first week is a version of initiation, a recurring team check-in is a version of ritual, and who gets invited into the real strategy conversation is a live boundary question.

EO Vietnam already builds a version of this through our Forum: small, confidential peer groups that meet regularly, built specifically to address that same lonely-at-the-top feeling Dave named above. July 23 is a chance to learn the thinking behind why that structure works, and to practice it with people outside your own Forum group for a few hours.

What you leave with

By the end of the day, the aim is a short, specific list. A few people in the room you've had a real conversation with, and a working vocabulary for the difference between a network and a real community. Both are things you can bring back to your own team, and to your own Forum group.

The details

The Art of Belonging runs July 23 at Hotel Caravelle Saigon.

1:30–6:00pm. Free for EO Vietnam members. $100 for guests and Significant Life Partners (SLPs). Seats are limited, so register early to hold your spot.

About Entrepreneurs' Organization (EO)

Entrepreneurs' Organization (EO) is a global, not-for-profit membership community of 20,000 leading business founders and owners representing more than 90 countries and 220 chapters worldwide. Founded in 1987, EO helps entrepreneurs move the world forward by unlocking their full potential through the power of trusted connections, leadership development, and premier learning opportunities that support the whole person. Learn more at eonetwork.org.