Transforming Family Businesses: Choosing Your Path

A unique programme to explore the strengths of family businesses and best practices for growth in China and around the world.

Transforming Family Businesses: Choosing your Path is a program designed to deliver exceptional preparation of future owners and leaders of Chinese family companies in helping them build a firm foundation for long-term business success. Jointly offered by the Guanghua School of Management, Peking University; Saïd Business School, University of Oxford; and Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, this program delivers the strategic insights and tools to help you master the diverse organisational challenges confronting your family business in Greater China and beyond. You will return to your company ready to seize new local and global opportunities, ensure smooth leadership transitions, and sustain growth for generations to come.

Program Objectives/ Takeaways

• Create an enduring family enterprise over generations
• Professionalise the family through family governance
• Lead a succession process to sustain generational growth
• Grow and transform your family business in the context of global competition
• Identify a compelling purpose for your family enterprise beyond financial success
• Create a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship as a source of new opportunities and competitive advantage
• Adapt to disruptions that are changing industries and business models
• Understand business implications of disruptive technologies on your family business short and long term
• Assess your role and develop your path within or outside a family enterprise

Benefits

• Family business leaders with new insights and enhanced management, strategy and innovation skills, better equipped to envision and execute on the future for their family businesses
• Application of these insights/ tools in your individual contexts for tangible outcomes and implementation
• A strong network of program graduates that can generate learning, career and investment opportunities
• Invitation to alumni events
• 5 MIT Sloan program day credits that count towards an Executive Certificate or Advanced Certificate
• Eligibility to apply for Associate Alumni status and enjoy benefits and services available for Guanghua School of Management, Peking University, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford

Programme outline

You will examine successful and sustainable family firms in a rich, three-module learning experience on three continents，taught in both Chinese and English with simultaneous translation.

Module 1

Explore the features of a typical family business, analyse the issues that frequently arise, and begin to examine how successful family firms have addressed those challenges. Assess your company’s strengths and weaknesses, plan for stabilisation and growth, and refine and articulate aspirations for the future.

• Building a successful family business in China
• Ensuring family and family business success over generations
• Designing governance for the business, ownership group and the family
• Growing a family business in the midst of a changing political and economic climate in China and globally
• Planning for and managing succession
• Assessing your life and career goals and their t with the family business

Module 2

Examine how businesses innovate across borders. Learn how to recognize your firm’s intrinsic advantages and bolster its capacity for innovation, within the firm and with partners, to build new market opportunities.

• Understanding your industry and how your company competes in it
• Going from local to global
• Identifying a compelling purpose for your company, your family and yourself
• The importance of responsible ownership in the 21st Century
• Growing and changing your family company
• Using governance to set direction and solve problems
• Creating a strong family team
• Assessing your best role in the family enterprise

Module 3

You will explore how to adapt to technological change and other global forces that are shaping business, manage the change process in your company, build your organisation, sustain growth and grow value, and develop yourself as a business leader.

• Adapting to industry disruption and technological change
• Creating a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship
• Achieving economic and social objectives in your family company
• Leading significant change in the family company
• Following the founder in the family company
• Thinking like an owner
• Assessing your personal development needs