Pramodita Sharma

Allan Cohen

Discover What Makes Family Businesses Beat the Odds and Thrive over Generations Families are complicated; family businesses even more so. Like other companies, family-run enterprises must develop leadership and entrepreneurial skills. But they must also manage family dynamics that rarely mirror the best practices in the latest Harvard Business Review. Allan Cohen and Pramodita Sharma, scholars with deep professional and personal roots in family businesses, show how enterprising families can transmit the hunger for excellence across generations. Using examples of firms that flourished and those that failed, they describe the practices that characterize entrepreneurial individuals, families, and organizations and offer pragmatic advice that can be tailored to your unique situation.

How Successful Family Businesses Develop Their Next Leaders

Entrepreneurs in Every Generation

Allan R. Cohen

Companies that are owned and run by families need to develop leadership and entrepreneurial skills just like any other company, but family firms face obstacles that hire and fire companies don't. Family dynamics rarely perfectly mirror the best practices in the latest Harvard Business Review. So what factors in the family and work environments enable the creation of leaders who share the entrepreneurial fire of the founders? Is there a specific education, training and experiential pathway that tips the odds of entrepreneurial success across generations? How do some firms manage to bypass family conflicts, disparate visions of the future, sibling rivalries, generational transition traps, death and divorces, that seem to mark the demise of so many family businesses? Cohen and Sharma draw on their deep and extensive research on family businesses to reveal the secrets of enterprising families, using examples of both firms that flourished and those that failed. While this book is written with top leadership in mind, it is especially focused on the needs of the second and third generations. Cohen and Sharma emphasise that the most important skill of all is thinking like an entrepreneur; something that succeeding generations in family firms often miss.

Pramodita Sharma

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