#135—Devin DeCiantis: The Enduring Power of Family Businesses

Devin DeCiantis is the co-author, with Ivan Lansberg, of the 2024 book THE ENDURING ENTERPRISE: How Family Businesses Thrive in Turbulent Condition. He is a Managing Partner at Lansberg Gersick Advisors (LGA), an advisory and educational partner trusted by many of the world’s largest family enterprises.

 Devin’s work and focus is on the financial, organizational, and strategic aspects of this business structure—the family enterprise. Devin brings his background in corporate strategy, economic analysis and investment banking to his work with these family businesses, family offices and family foundations.  

Several unique attributes family businesses set them apart from the various corporate forms, public or private, corporations or LLCs or partnership. Many of these differences build a natural immunity and competitive advantage of sorts that traditional corporations struggle to build.  

In this episode, we discuss some the key findings in his book, including:  

• What enduring lessons family businesses can teach regular corporations about planning for not just quarters, but quarter-centuries 
• The unique advantages—and weaknesses—of family businesses, whose longevity often span decades, or even centuries 
• The unique role family businesses play in economies, especially in markets like South Asia, East Asia, and Latin America 
• The 7 stabilizing strategies that these businesses employ effectively, as they often are built amidst emerging and frontier economies where basic infrastructure and resources are often lacking 

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Episode Timeline:

00:00—Highlight from today's episode
01:31—Introducing Devin + the topic of today’s episode
03:29—If you really know me, you know that...
04:20—What is your definition of strategy?
06:30—Historical context of family owned businesses
08:55—Examples of major family owned businesses
10:58—What motivated Devin to study family businesses
13:08—Family owned businesses in more volatile environments
16:06—7 stabilizing strategies family owned businesses consistently deploy
17:51—Differentiation strategy
20:31—Resilience in family-owned enterprises
23:08—Modularity as core driver of growth and stability
26:33—How family owned businesses benefit from modularity
29:26—How non-family-owned organizations can leverage modularity 
31:24—Strategic redundancy in family owned businesses
33:44—How can people follow you and continue learning from you? 

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Additional Resources:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/devindeciantis
Link to book: THE ENDURING ENTERPRISE

Thank you to our guest. Thank you to our executive producer, Karina Reyes, our editor, Zach Ness, and the rest of the team. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. I'm your host, Kaihan Krippendorff. Thank you for listening.

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