Developing Entrepreneurial Organizations

Entrepreneurs in Every Generation: How Successful Family Businesses Develop Their Next Leaders is a seven-chapter book published by Berrett-Koehler Publisher in 2016. Entrepreneurs in Every Generation shows readers how success in family business means assuring next generation entrepreneurial leadership in three dimensions: the business, the owning family, and the organization that nurtures both. Applying the entrepreneurial mind-set to all three dimensions, professors Allan Cohen and Pramodita Sharma define the challenges and the role for leadership; applying the entrepreneurial mind-set in all three dimensions is what sets family enterprises apart. The book not only reviews best practices, but it also urges special attention to the uniqueness of context. It also guides the reader through work sheets on how to understand and adapt to context. In Chapter 6 (35 pages), Cohen and Sharma show that effective redesign of a successful family enterprise and implementation requires careful planning linked to the long-term innovation objectives, understanding the current state of the organization to be sure that changes take current conditions into account, recognizing that not just roles and reporting relationships have to change but also actual practices and policies, seeing that the right people-family as well as nonfamily members-are put in place, and working hard at communicating clearly at all levels and managing the transition. Redesigning a successful enterprise to accomplish new strategic objectives is hard. Enterprising families with a long-term orientation, determined to foster all levels of innovation while maintaining the core business find ways to accomplish this challenging goal.

• Leadership
• Succession planning
• Business growth
• Family businesses
• Entrepreneurial management