Golden Age For Family Businesses

Family Businesses To Take Advantage Of The New Roaring 2020s

Today I want to talk to you about why I believe that family businesses are uniquely positioned to take advantage of the new roaring 2020s.

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The Roaring 2020s

Hi there, it's James Taylor, he a keynote speaker on creativity, innovation, and artificial intelligence and the founder of speakers you today I want to talk to you about why I believe that family businesses are really uniquely positioned just now to take advantage of the what we call the roaring 2020s

I believe we're about to go into, we're going to see a real bursting of creativity of innovation of businesses really taking over new markets, entering into new areas is going to be a really fascinating time to be in the world of work in business.

And I think that family businesses are uniquely positioned for this time. And that's for a number of different reasons.

Resilient

The first one is a word I'm hearing all the time now from boards of organizations from C suite executives is the word resilient, resilient, resiliency, this word resilience. So being able to flex, being able to deal with no matter what happens, you can stay resilient, as I call is something that family businesses have almost they have in their DNA, they've had to be resilient. Because often you'll see, especially these large family businesses, is they maybe have lots of different parts of the business that are involved in them, maybe in different industries, multiple industries, multiple territories. One organization,

I've spoken a number of times for his family business network, which is an amazing network. I've spoken for them in the Middle East, and also in Brazil, as well as in Latin America, and one for the organization. And it's really these people who've got these large family businesses that are members of this wonderful organization. And the thing that really impressed me was spending time with these multi-generational leaders. So you might have the grandparent who is the president of the organization, you might have the next generation was the current CEO or CTO. And then you might have the younger generations after that it was the managers or maybe even grandchildren who just kind of coming up as apprentices and trainees in the organizations. And when I talk to those organizations, and especially the older generations in them, they tell me the stories of resilience, how something happened, they've seen multiple market crashes, multiple recessions, all kinds of things that have happened. And they talk about this idea of staying resilient. So I think there's a lot that more publicly-traded, a more traditional kind of corporate companies can learn from family businesses about staying resilient.

Agility

But the other part is agility. So this is being lighted of foot fleet of foot, as we sometimes say. And being able to spot opportunities and take advantage of those opportunities. Don't wait all the time, for lots and lots of research and data, sometimes just kind of go when you spot that opportunity can go for it. So there's an opportunistic side as well that you can build a strategy of a large business on just being opportunistic, you have to have something wider than that. But there are times that being opportunistic can be very, very useful for you and maybe successful for you. So as I was talking to these organizations, it was also reminding me of there's a great TV show just now called succession. With a Scottish article, Brian Cox, who's the leader of this can follow this family business. And it's all the machinations that are going on in this kind of family business. And it was interesting just watching that because I've seen some of the same dynamics, albeit drama, dramatic sized in it as well that I saw with some of those family businesses in Latin America, and in the Middle East as well. But one of the things that really impressed me, and I always wondered why it was their ability to be agile and to take decisions quickly.

I was talking the other day to Professor GERD Gigerenzer from the Max Planck Institute in Berlin. Professor Gigerenzer is like an expert on heuristics and decision-making. Often a lot of large companies will bring him in to talk about how to make better decisions in their organizations. He wrote a wonderful book called risk savvy that I highly encourage you to check out. And we were talking about what holds your organization's back larger organizations. And he mentioned this phrase which is called defensive decision making. And what this defensive decision-making means is that sometimes the CEO of an organization or a senior leader in a more traditional organization, will they'll have a hunch or a gut feeling intuition. This is the right strategy we should be going after this opportunity here. We should be going for it. But then what they have to do is they have to Go through this whole process of bringing in external consultants who bring in 100 pages, your document PowerPoints, and you have to go through masses and masses of research.

And sometimes by that you've gone through that process, you've kind of lost the opportunity, or you some of the drives has gone out before. But often Usually what happens is it just kind of comes back and they just go ahead with the decision that we're going to make anyway. And I think what we find often in family businesses, is they there's nowhere to hide for them. It's not like they're going to go out often and add to it an external consultant, bring in extra consultant, they're decision-makers in the room. And often there's family board, there are board meetings, they might have external directors as well, to provide a different perspective on things. But there's institutional knowledge, there's almost a DNA, a family, a culture within the organization. And there's an experience in an organization that you often don't find in other types of organizations as well, which is why they're so powerful. So they go often down this defensive decision-making, they'll make it they'll come up with this is where we should be going to explain it to the rest of the family members in the organization. There'll be some questions and they're like, okay, let's execute, let's go for it. Or let's create that pilot, for example, there's not so much of the defensive decision-making that Professor Gigerenzer often talks about.

So this is why this tie that we're going into just now, these new roaring 2020s, as they say, this post-pandemic era that we're hopefully going to be coming into, is so held so much potential for family businesses because they're not held back.

Golden Age For Family Businesses

By that defensive decision making. There's gonna be so many opportunities in this time for businesses to grow to move into new fields into new areas into new industries into new countries and new territories. This is going to be a golden age for family businesses. My name is James Taylor. I would love your comments and your feedback on whether you agree with me that this is going to be a golden age for family businesses. Just leave a message down below. Maybe you've got a family business, you've started a family business, you're a member of a family business. Do you believe that these next few years are going to be a golden time for your organization? Leave those comments below.