Overview
Future Family Enterprise Program
MIT Sloan School of Management
Cambridge, MA
Sept. 26-Oct. 1, 2021
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The Future Family Enterprise program leads multigenerational families through a stimulating week-long conversation that produces clarity on the path ahead for each participating family and its enterprise. Your family will learn practical concepts and tested practices—organized around examples of multigenerational success and failure—to aid your thinking, improve your long-term planning and alignment, and shape the roadmap of your family enterprise system.
In this six-day program (Sunday afternoon to Friday at noon), faculty explore the opportunities, challenges, and future trends for owning, governing, and managing a family company and a broader family enterprise organization over multiple generations. Conversations and class sessions focus on the distinct issues faced by multigenerational families that have survived beyond the founder-stage. The program views the family enterprise through the lens of ownership, helping you to understand the important decisions that are yours to make as well as how to govern and plan for the longevity of your family’s enterprise activities.
In addition to interactive classroom work and exchanges among families from around the world, your family will have daily, private, facilitated discussions with an experienced family enterprise advisor to focus on your interests and agenda. Families should attend in teams spanning two or more generations. Each family team will leave the program with a tailored action plan built together over the course.
Important questions addressed include:
- How is technology shaping industries and companies, and how must family-owned businesses adapt?
- What are the emerging strategies for capitalizing, owning, and controlling family companies?
- What are the trends in governance of multigenerational companies, family offices, ownership groups, families, and foundations?
- How are families themselves modernizing and remaining united in this mobile, globalized world?
- With Generation X assuming leadership roles, and the emergence of the Millennial Generation, how are succession planning and next generation talent development more complex today? How do families prepare for generational transitions in this fast-changing environment?
- What are the latest strategies for steering and sustaining a complex, multigenerational family enterprise, with a growing number of family owners, for another generation or more?
The combined experience of faculty and participants produces deep understandings and even profound transformations for participating families. Your family will have conversations you never anticipated and will leave the program feeling closer and more aligned about your future as a result.
The Future Family Enterprise program is led by MIT Sloan Senior Lecturer John Davis, a pioneer in the family enterprise field and a globally recognized authority on family enterprise, family wealth, and the family office. Davis joined MIT Sloan after leading the family enterprise area at Harvard Business School for more than 20 years. He is an award-winning teacher and researcher and is the creator of some of the field’s most impactful conceptual frameworks. Davis is also Chairman of Cambridge Family Enterprise Group, a global advisory and research organization.
Faculty
The Future Family Enterprise program is led by MIT Sloan Senior Lecturer John Davis, a pioneer in the family enterprise field and a globally recognized authority on family enterprise, family wealth, and the family office. Professor Davis joined MIT Sloan after leading the family enterprise area at Harvard Business School for more than 20 years. He is an award-winning teacher and researcher and is the creator of some of the field’s most impactful conceptual frameworks. Professor Davis is also Chairman of Cambridge Family Enterprise Group, a global advisory and research organization. He tweets at @ProfJohnDavis.
Jake Cohen is Senior Associate Dean for Undergraduate and Master’s Programs and a Senior Lecturer in Accounting and Law at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He oversees MIT Sloan’s portfolio of degree programs, as well as the Offices of Admissions, Student Life, and Career Development. Professor Cohen is responsible for setting strategy for the undergraduate and all Master’s programs, including the new Master of Business Analytics program. He teaches Financial Accounting to Master of Finance and Executive Education students, as well as Israel Lab, the newest addition to MIT Sloan’s portfolio of Action Learning programs. Professor Cohen is a member of the Dean’s Leadership Council, and MIT’s Title IX officer for MIT Sloan.
Jason Jay is a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Director of the Sustainability Initiative at MIT Sloan. He teaches courses on leadership, strategy, and innovation for sustainable business. Professor Jay engages students and alumni in hands-on projects with leading companies and organizations. These efforts help build a community of innovators for sustainability that includes MIT students and alumni, faculty and researchers, with partners in business, government, NGOs, and hybrid organizations.
Jonathan Ruane is a Lecturer in the Global Economics and Management group at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a Digital Fellow at MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE). His interests are at the intersection of technology, entrepreneurship, strategy and international markets. He also is an Adjunct Professor at Trinity College Dublin and a Fulbright recipient. Professor Ruane cofounded the ‘Global Business of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics’ graduate course with Prof Simon Johnson in addition to faculty teaching positions across MBA, EMBA, and Executive Education courses at MIT. He worked closely with Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson on “Machine Platform Crowd.”
Academic Setting
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