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Expanding the business, succession planning, professionalisation, capital raising are some of the key challenges faced by family businesses, says ISB’s Deepak Chandra.
“In addition to teaching core management principles, the curriculum should focus on effective ways of addressing these unique challenges faced by family businesses,” he pointed out.
Innovation is an important aspect for all businesses and formal education helps bring about innovation, explains Prabal K. Sen, a faculty member of XLRI. Proper innovation and strategies can help boost the turnover manifold.
Flexible Structure
According to K. Kumar, a professor at IIM, Bangalore, the pedagogy and the structure of the education programme should take into account the fact that entrepreneurs cannot be away from their business for very long at any point in time and should be structured in a way so as to be able to strike a balance between concepts and application.
IIM-B has a certificate programme called Management Programme for Entrepreneurs and Family Businesses , which is designed flexibly into eight modules of five days each spread over nine months.
ISB’s 15-month long programme focuses on enhancing analytical and functional skills, strengthening strategy, and leadership as well as bring to the fore solutions to unique family business related challenges.
The programme helps equip candidates with diverse learning opportunities through interactions with world-class faculty, international exposure, industry interventions and experiential learning.
It also provides global exposure with one week of classes at Kellogg School of Management and optional international immersion programmes in China and Africa, Chandra elaborates.
Way forward
With family businesses becoming more complex, the younger generation would feel the need to acquire knowledge and skills apart from learning the nuances of business from the previous generation so as to be able to constantly upgrade the existing line of business, says Kumar.
The complex business structure also makes it imperative for the younger generation to be aware of the strengths and weaknesses of family-controlled business vis-à-vis widely-held organisations, and combine it with skills gained from modern management thought to gain a competitive edge in the market place, Chandra explains.
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