Search results

This chapter focuses on governance as a key element of the safeguarding system of the family enterprise. The management is in charge of the company’s performance in terms of profit and growth. The governance system is designed to secure value protection by designing a robust leadership system, monitoring and advising management, reviewing critical decisions, and providing fail-safe solutions in case of serious malfunctions of the management system. This chapter develops a typology of critical elements which could endanger the development of the company, including conflicts and disruptions among the owner group. Results of recent research on the root causes of the downfall of family enterprises are presented. Finally, a concept of a three-layer protection system is developed with the aim of providing stability for longevity.

Microenterprises (MEs) are vital to the growth and prosperity of economies around the world. All levels of society, from universities to national governments, have collaborated to improve the chances of survival and future growth of these businesses. The threat to life is serious, and unless concerted action is taken, the situation will spiral out of control. Policymakers and business leaders must work together to address the sustainability crisis. The study, therefore, set out to determine how various entrepreneurial skills (such as creativity, collaboration, networking, and risk-taking) affect the long-term viability of MEs. The overall objective of the study was to determine the importance of innovative problem-solving, collaboration, networking, and willingness to take calculated risks of microentrepreneurs for the long-term success of their businesses. A total of 274 microentrepreneurs in rural areas of the Ancash region of Peru were surveyed in the grocery, hardware, clothing, and food service sectors. The survival of the MEs was tested on four dimensions: innovation, leadership, networking, and risk-taking. According to the results, MEs managers can increase their longevity by cultivating creative skills, strengthening leadership as a key to business sustainability and survival, maximizing the use of networks to gain a market advantage and expand their customer base, and employing calculated risk-taking.

This chapter introduces and discusses spirituality in the workplace from the lens of corporate culture. Organizational members represent the core embodiment of businesses, while their performance signifies vitalization of strategic goals that heavily depends on their sense of wellbeing and belonging to their organizations. In that sense, organizations must indulge on positive cycles to comprehend, tune, and affix on members' well-being for sustainable longevity and profitability. For this chapter, strategic management capsulates implementation of premeditated objectives via systematic establishment of agendas and deployment of assets. In the same vein, spirituality is centered around the self-induced nature of organizational member behaviors. Elaboratively, authors provide a condensed corpus of research to identify and touch base with the multidisciplinary nature of spirituality in differentiating business types. Accordingly, select constructs are exemplified within the general and sub-fields of management to characterize the linkages of spirituality spanning across service and production focused industries. Based on their expertise, authors exemplify tourism and hospitality literature for the representation of service-focused businesses and provide mini-review of the housed organizational spirituality literature. As a secondary focus, authors discuss the employee, management, and organizational level similarities of spirituality by largely focusing on organizational member perceptions. Distinctively, this work exemplifies the prolific studies to help distinguish longstanding “belief-centric” devotions from organizational spirituality of exemplified industries. The chapter finishes with suggestions for future studies.

As of 2020, London's Financial Times had ranked Fundação Dom Cabral (FDC) as one of the world's leading executive education institutions and the top such institution in Latin America for 15 consecutive years. In 2011, FDC was also ranked fifth on the Financial Times' list of the 40 most respected business schools in the world. For FDC itself and for its co-founder, Emerson de Almeida, this recognition was a wonderful way of celebrating the 35th anniversary of an institution that has become a leader in applied management education in Brazil.

How did this young Brazilian institution achieve this? As is the case for any great undertaking, many people played crucial roles in its creation and consolidation. However, its history is closely tied to the life of its co-founder, Emerson de Almeida.

Emerson was FDC's Chief Executive from its foundation in 1976 until 2012, when he became President of its Board of Governance. ¹ He is primarily an innovator and drew his inspiration from visits to world-renowned business schools. Once he understood the needs arising from executive thinking processes, he was able to adapt these schools' best practices to suit the Brazilian culture and context.

‘You must always try the impossible’, he says. This case study presents the story of an exceptional institutional intrapreneur who championed and led the transformation of executive education in Brazil.