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The learning outcomes of this case will help the participants to assess values, motivations and interpersonal relations that exist and evolve in a family firm; analyze individual-level strategies in absence of business growth strategy and succession plan; expose trade-offs associated with natural inheritance or merit-based succession; reveal alternate strategies of coping with conflicts in multi-generation multi-family firms.

This case focuses on leadership, succession and conflicts at Dalal Group, a 50 years old textile yarn trading family-run business. The trading business has 10 members across three generations working in it. The business is making profits but the growth of the business is not synchronous to the number of family members working in it. As revenues are stable and buyers’ network is not growing, an internal tussle has begun among the members to preserve business resources available to them. The founder, who is also the Managing Director of the Group, is about to retire in a couple of years but there is no clear successor to his position. In the absence of a business growth plan and uncertainty about the next leader, members are clueless about their own future and that is affecting their interpersonal relations at work. This has triggered the need for decision and action by the founder, failing which the business might disintegrate. The case author has used personal interview methods and secondary sources like annual reports and manuals of the company to collect data and information.

Senior Undergraduates, MBA (Entrepreneurship and Family Business), MBA.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 6: Human resource management.

This case presents the history and recent governance challenges of Carvajal, S.A., a Colombia-based, family-owned, billion-dollar-plus holding company that had offered printing-related (e.g., Yellow Pages, notebooks) and other products and services across and beyond South America for more than a century. Specifically, the case details the company’s state of affairs in early 2011, a time by which Carvajal’s flagship businesses had matured rapidly with the emergence of digital technology and diminished demand for paper/print-based products. Though profits and growth remained positive, Carvajal’s leaders knew that upholding the business’s legacy of returns, dividends for all family members, and extensive philanthropy would take significant strategy and execution.

Compounding the strategy issues, Carvajal faced these market challenges with new leadership: the first non-family CEO since the company’s inception. Well-established Colombian executive Ricardo Obregon had been hired in 2008 over two family candidates to lead the business. Obregon was to oversee a complex governance network that included a holding company with seven operating companies, their management and respective boards, a family council, and 280 members (including spouses) of a shareholding family in its sixth generation. Carvajal’s business and family leaders had to face market issues and decisions that included the possibility of taking public the operating companies and/or the holding company while maintaining the business’s long traditions of unity, respect, strong ethics, and philanthropy. That meant optimizing several crucial relationships: between the family and the new CEO; between the family and the board; between the operating companies and the holding company; and between members of the large Carvajal family, many of whom now resided outside of Colombia and Latin America.

Understand general and specific challenges associated with carrying on a longstanding family business facing multiple market challenges; explore the process of engaging a complex family-business governance network to handle business challenges while maintaining family values; consider the effects of culture on a multi-generation family business.

The ATF case is a succinct opportunity to explore the many special features of leadership succession for a family business. In 2009 the company was passing the baton to the oldest of three sons in the second-generation family business.

ATF produced metal and plastic fasteners for, primarily, the automotive industry. ATF had grown into a company with more than $50 million in annual revenues. The company had grown in large part through alliances with other family businesses around the world. First-generation patriarch Don Surber had led the company since he acquired it in 1982. Don was known for his charismatic leadership style and his focus on driving value through a network approach.

The case traces the career paths of all three sons and looks at the succession through the eyes of the oldest son, Jason Surber. The elements, constituents, and challenges of succession are evident. The fundamental insight is that business leadership succession is far more than just passing the business leadership baton. It also requires attention to the family, the board, the whole system of external stakeholders, and the future of ownership.

The epilogue in this note covers the period from 2009 to 2012 by describing what Jason did to earn credibility, to incorporate his brothers, and to define his personal leadership philosophy and style. The epilogue thus provides students with an opportunity to consider and define their own personal philosophy of management leadership and their own style. They will see the art of melding styles from the past with their own for the future.

This case is designed to achieve the following learning objectives: recognize the impact of personality traits on leadership style; identify the key elements in a turnaround strategy; examine leadership best practices from a gender perspective; and assess the role of strategic decision-making on company growth.

The case study describes how Lisa Su (Su), the first woman CEO of Advanced Micro Devices, helped turn around the debt-laden semiconductor firm within a decade through her transformational leadership, vision and values. The case first touches upon Su’s early life and education and the influence of her parents in shaping her personality. It then focuses on the first half of Su’s career, during which she was working on semiconductor projects and was involved in research and product development, and how she made the gradual shift to a people management role in her stint of over a decade at IBM followed by a leadership opportunity at Freescale Semiconductor Inc. The case then describes Su’s move to AMD in 2012 as Senior Vice President and General Manager of the company’s global business divisions at a time when AMD was nearly US$2.5bn in debt and revenues had increased only once in the previous five years. There were also rumors of bankruptcy and spin-offs after the company lost more than US$1bn in the year 2012. The cas

This case is meant for MBA students as part of their Organizational Behavior, Leadership, and Strategic Management curriculum.

Teaching notes Student feedback details.

CCS 11: Strategy.

Entrepreneurship, strategy, family business.

MBA, PhD (Mgmt)

DK Dies and Tools was set up initially as a tool room by its founder Krishna Verma. It manufactured machine parts, sheet metal tools, jigs and fixtures, plastic/rubber moulds and metal fabrications. The firm came to be known as DK Exports (henceforth DKX) when it was professionalized in the year 2003 for merchant exporting. Lately, after the founder's demise, professionalization had become a dire need when the firm faced with loss of customers, the market share was taken over by the Chinese, workers' expectations had risen, poor internal communications, search for dynamic capabilities and finally a need to diversify had arisen. Unexpected death of the founder had pushed the firm into doldrums. It was because of the founder's relationship and reputation in the market that the business prospered. Unfortunately, the tacit knowledge he possessed could not be handed over to his son Kunal, which led to complexes in business. Hence, there arose a need for internationalization for finding new customers and markets. Entrepreneurial orientation needed a change. The new Chairman, Kunal, had expertise in operations management, with his wife, Priyanka, looking after development via overseas collaborations. The firm had been struggling to create a two-tier top-level management to decide on operational issues, besides search for newer destinations for increasing the scale of operations.

To understand how multilevel entrepreneurship happens and the importance of translating tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge, especially at times when the founder has to pass the baton to the second generation.

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In mid-2013, the Lee family, which owned the Hong Kong based food and health product giant Lee Kum Kee (LKK), struggled with how best to increase involvement of the fifth generation (G5), the children of the company's current fourth-generation (G4) senior executives and governance leaders. Only two of the fourteen G5 members had joined the company, and few had expressed interest in further involvement, including in the multiple learning and development programs the business offered, such as a mentoring program. Many of the G5 cousins had expressed little interest in business careers in general, and none of them currently was serving as an LKK intern. G4 members observed that their children were busy with family obligations, hobbies, and emerging careers outside the business. G5's lack of interest in business and governance roles was part of a growing pattern of low family engagement in general, exhibited by the cancellation of recent family retreats (once an annual tradition) because of apathy and some underlying conflict. A history of splits among past generations of the Lee family regarding business leadership made the engagement issue even more meaningful and critical.

Students will consider the challenge from the point of view of G4 family members David Lee, chairman of the family's Family Office, and his sister, Elizabeth Mok, who ran the Family Learning and Development Center. They and their three siblings saw engaging the next generation as a top priority, one related to key concepts including family-business continuity, generational engagement and empowerment, succession, emotional ownership, and intrinsic/extrinsic motivation.