The survival of family businesses may depend on their response to the climate crisis. A new coaching method goes straight to the collective unconscious of organisations, revealing the key to successful intergenerational transition.
Evolving To Survive
Over 60% of the world’s businesses are family firms. Leadership transition is a hazardous moment in the life of these organisations, and few survive as far as their fourth generation Among the critical factors determining their long-term survival is their capacity to develop a strong and distinctive entrepreneurial orientation (EO) in each generation: the capacity to reinvent the business, and to seize new opportunities amid shifting landscapes and challenges both within and outside the family.
The EO of a company is naturally entangled with its younger members’ emotional ownership regarding the company’s ethos and activities. The achievements of one generation can be destroyed in the next if a family does not acknowledge these psychological conditions for its continued business success.
The related challenge for specialists in family governance is to identify barriers to emotional ownership that disinclines the next generation to continue the family enterprise. For the current generation, response to the climate crisis is a crucial determinant – but few businesses are equipped to understand the dynamics governing their survival in the face of this generational challenge.
The paper below explores the challenges in more detail: