This is how successful family businesses think about the future.
Six business leaders describe their biggest job

When a long-running family business welcomes a new generation into the ownership circle, what exactly is being handed down? Is it a set of balance sheets and the keys to the executive suite, or is it something bigger than that?
Interviews with six business leaders yielded some intriguing responses. Five of the leaders quoted here are heads of multigenerational family enterprises that have endured through as many as eleven generations and 750 years, defying the statistic of disaster in the third generation.
Jony Ives, Chief Design Officer for Apple, is here too. Although he is not a family business leader, his explanation of the thinking behind a book based on Apple’s product design is closely aligned with the attitudes of multigenerational family enterprises who speak of a responsibility to future generations. That sense of duty is most often not just about the family itself, the immediate stakeholders; it is wider than that, representing a commitment to a wider community.
It seems possible that having such a sense of a stake in a global future is one of the very things that keeps these businesses strong through the centuries.
Peter Gordon, Director of Supervisory Board and fifth generation of the William Grant Family, distillers of Glenfiddich Whisky
Handing on the baton to the next generation
“The biggest job for our generation is to encourage the next generation to join the business. This seems an easy job, but we are conscious that we have to manage expectations and paint a balanced picture of what might lie ahead.
We have a metaphor that we use, which is that our shares are like the baton in a relay race. There are responsibilities — and privileges — afforded to you once you have the baton. Our ultimate responsibility is to try and pass the business on in better shape than when we received it.”
Maximilian Riedel, President of Riedel and eleventh generation of the glassmaking family
We have to reinvent ourselves
“You never want to be caught being the last, is the family motto. …
It is my only goal to hand Riedel over to the next generation. With the achievement of that goal, I will have done my job well. You cannot hand over a company which is falling apart … my goal is to structure the company in such a way that in 30 years from now, it is still successful and I can hand it over to the next generation.
How I want to approach the future is not only to do what we do best, but also to reinvent ourselves. It’s a must — it has to happen.”
Grant Lundberg, CEO of Lundberg Family Farms and third generation of sustainable rice growers
Keeping the family culture and values
“We very much want the fourth generation to engage, to understand what they own — because ultimately they’re going to have to decide what to do with it. We’re not going to be here. The business is going to be theirs. They’re going to have to try to figure out what role are they going to play. Are they going to just an owner, or do they want to be a director, or do they want to work here and be an owner and maybe a director too?
We’re trying to ensure a business that sets a framework that keeps the family culture and values going forward into time.”
Adil Naji, President and Founder of Arabesque and fourth generation of Moroccan tile manufacturers (in business 750 years)
This legacy doesn’t belong to us, it is the family heritage
“Every day is a challenge, knowing that my family has been going from generation to generation. It’s a weight and a pressure on everyone to succeed and keep excelling so it will be a legacy of improvement, rather than a legacy of continuity.
The business has been in the family for generations and that’s our legacy … I don’t think we have a right to sell this legacy because it doesn’t belong to us, it is the family heritage.”
Giuseppe Lavazza, Vice Chairman of the Board and fourth generation of the Italian coffee family
The company is an institutional asset
“[My grandfather and his two brothers] were really aware of the critical need to keep their commitment long lasting. They decided to draft a new family agreement between them, a sort of family pact. They pledged to keep the company in the hands of the family.
… The idea that they had of the company was not as property, but an institutional asset, a legacy to protect, to serve, by devoting their lives, their professional life, their talent and all their energy. That has been the shared mindset.”
Jony Ive, Chief Design Officer for Apple
We are consumed by the future, by what doesn’t exist yet
Speaking to cultural site Dazed, Ive said that the company “had a responsibility to … archive” some of its best product designs from the last two decades. He noted that Apple spent eight years developing a book (released in 2016) that would showcase those designs.
“Honestly, it felt more of an obligation than something that we felt really compelled to do. The reason for that, and I guess it’s a fairly obvious one, is that as designers, we are far more interested in and consumed by the future; in what doesn’t exist yet. But we’ve been working together for 20, 25 years, and it felt like the right and appropriate thing to do.”
