Ember Associates Vietnam
Zsolt Tököli · Founder

Executive coach.
Trainer.
Writer.
Builder of Tér.

Hungarian by birth, based in Saigon since 2018.

Ember Associates Vietnam · est. 2018
Zsolt Tököli
Saigon · 2026 Photo · Ember Associates

Zsolt is an executive coach and corporate trainer with thirty years behind him and a stubborn belief that most professional problems are not really professional problems. They are clarity problems wearing a suit.

His coaching is grounded in the constructive-developmental tradition — Robert Kegan, Jennifer Garvey Berger, Marshall Goldsmith. His training rooms tend to be loud, irreverent, and surprisingly quiet at the right moments.

When he is not coaching, he writes literary fiction in Hungarian. When he is not writing, he is building Tér, an AI thinking partner for decision-makers. The three pursuits feed each other more than most people expect.

A working theory
"Most professional problems are clarity problems wearing a suit."
The longer version

Thirty years of asking the question people hoped to avoid.

The polite version is "what are you actually deciding here?" The less polite version is whatever it takes to cut through the story they are telling themselves.

Zsolt trained as a corporate trainer in the early 2000s, moved into executive coaching, and never went back. His work sits in the constructive-developmental tradition, which is a long way of saying he is more interested in how people see than in what they do. The "what they do" tends to take care of itself once the "how they see" shifts.

He is Hungarian. He has lived in Ho Chi Minh City since 2018, and runs the Vietnam side of Ember Associates from there. His clients are mostly senior, mostly stuck on something they cannot quite name. He works in English, Hungarian, and the occasional moment of useful silence.

His training credentials include programmes with Marshall Goldsmith, Jennifer Garvey Berger, and Harvard. He has worked with Heineken, Shell, Microsoft, and a long list of companies whose names appear in the next section. None of that is the most interesting thing about him.

The most interesting thing is what he does with all of it.

He distilled the methodology into DecisionLab, a one-day experiential workshop that uses poker as a simulator for high-stakes decision-making. Then he distilled it further into Tér, an AI-powered thinking partner he is launching publicly in 2026. The shorthand among early users is "Zsolt Lite." He did not come up with that. They did.

In parallel he is finishing his first novel, Azonos, an experimental work of Hungarian literary fiction about business self-deception and the strange ways people stay asleep at the wheel. Same obsession, different door.

If there is a thread through all of it, it is a quiet allergy to performance and a long love affair with clarity. He thinks most people are smarter than they are getting credit for, and he tends to bet on them.

For the record

Where the work has lived. Some of it, anyway.

Lineage
Constructive-developmental coaching — in the tradition of Robert Kegan, Jennifer Garvey Berger, Marshall Goldsmith.
Training programmes
Marshall Goldsmith · Jennifer Garvey Berger · Harvard
Languages
English · Hungarian · and the occasional moment of useful silence
Based in
Ho Chi Minh City since 2018
Practice
Ember Associates Vietnam — executive coaching and corporate training
Selected clients
A partial list. The rest are under NDA.
Heineken
Shell
Microsoft
Unilever
General Motors
Citibank
Tetra Pak
Cisco
Ericsson
GSK
British American Tobacco
Richter Gedeon
RMIT Vietnam
Gradion
Three doors into the work

The same obsession. Different ways in.

If you have something you cannot quite name, that is usually a good sign. Reach out.

Email
Based in
Ho Chi Minh City