Devin DeCiantis
Appearances
Let's Talk Legacy
The Enduring Enterprise Pt. 2, with Devin DeCiantis and Ivan Lansberg
Absolutely. LGA.global. You can reach our team. We've got about 40 of us around the world who are wise and caring advisors to the world's leading enterprising families and would love to hear from anybody who wants to discuss these topics. Awesome. Well, I thank you guys for your time so much.
Let's Talk Legacy
The Enduring Enterprise Pt. 2, with Devin DeCiantis and Ivan Lansberg
Thank you, Garrett.
Let's Talk Legacy
The Enduring Enterprise Pt. 2, with Devin DeCiantis and Ivan Lansberg
It's a great question, Gary, and obviously a sensitive one. But in general, I think it addresses precisely one of the challenges that we wanted to write about in anticipation of not just the US election, but over the course of 2024, more than half of the world for the first time in history went to the polls to elect their governments.
Let's Talk Legacy
The Enduring Enterprise Pt. 2, with Devin DeCiantis and Ivan Lansberg
And not just in the US, but in many countries, the outcomes of those elections were complicated. Right. and presented the businesses operating in those environments with potentially a very different world to navigate the day after the election than the day before the election.
Let's Talk Legacy
The Enduring Enterprise Pt. 2, with Devin DeCiantis and Ivan Lansberg
And part of our aspiration with the book was to provide examples from other places where perhaps those lurches left or right in the political spectrum or in terms of industrial policy might have been more dramatic, but they're dramatic with an effect. The effect is that you still need to attend to and think about how you're going to reposition yourself in the face of
Let's Talk Legacy
The Enduring Enterprise Pt. 2, with Devin DeCiantis and Ivan Lansberg
you know, tariff barriers or a change in access to supply chains that are competitive, depending on which countries you operate in and the importance of the diversification within those supply chains, the importance of redundancy built into your inventory and warehousing, the importance of strategic simplification in terms of recognizing the impact of inflation on your business model and the compression on your margins.
Let's Talk Legacy
The Enduring Enterprise Pt. 2, with Devin DeCiantis and Ivan Lansberg
All of these issues that are dialed up to 11 in some environments around the world, places where hyperinflation is right, are still present here, just not at 11, but maybe at seven on the dial. And most business leaders are used to a two or a three.
Let's Talk Legacy
The Enduring Enterprise Pt. 2, with Devin DeCiantis and Ivan Lansberg
So in that respect, we've hoped as we wrote this book and in the selection of the cases that we've included, that this would be a bit of a new and fresh strategic playbook. for leaders who are trying to navigate what is undoubtedly going to be among the most tumultuous several years in recent American history.
Let's Talk Legacy
The Enduring Enterprise Pt. 2, with Devin DeCiantis and Ivan Lansberg
Yeah, sure. And thanks, Gary, for calling it out. In fact, we didn't develop these strategies. These strategies we identified as recurring among the hundreds of families around the world we studied. So as we went out and tried our best to understand this phenomena of enduring enterprises and what made them tick and what allowed for them,
Let's Talk Legacy
The Enduring Enterprise Pt. 2, with Devin DeCiantis and Ivan Lansberg
to adapt to these tumultuous conditions, we kept coming back to this cluster. There were more than seven at one point, but we distilled it down to these seven because these were the seven most recurring patterns. And we dedicated in the book one chapter to each of these strategies and included an iconic case study that exemplified each of the strategies.
Let's Talk Legacy
The Enduring Enterprise Pt. 2, with Devin DeCiantis and Ivan Lansberg
So I can list a couple of them here, but things like redundancy, which feels again, We use that term almost pejoratively like, oh, that's redundant. We don't need that extra infrastructure in order to be able to do what we do. But to Yvonne's point just now, sometimes efficiencies are actually essential for the viability long term of an enterprise.
Let's Talk Legacy
The Enduring Enterprise Pt. 2, with Devin DeCiantis and Ivan Lansberg
And the iconic case that we use in the case of redundancy is a hotel operator, a family controlled company in Haiti. That's been at the epicenter of every possible social, political, economic, and environmental disaster you can imagine over their 50-year leadership of this enterprise.
Let's Talk Legacy
The Enduring Enterprise Pt. 2, with Devin DeCiantis and Ivan Lansberg
And in the face of that, recognizing that at any moment, any one of the essential systems that allow for them to continue could break down. They have backup generators for their backup generators. They have backup communication systems. They have backup internet infrastructure. They have backup security teams.
Let's Talk Legacy
The Enduring Enterprise Pt. 2, with Devin DeCiantis and Ivan Lansberg
They have backup warehouses and stockpiles of all the essential needs that their guests might desire, not just for the time at which they're there, but in the event that the entire society collapses as it had in the wake of the big earthquake in recent years and now. with all sorts of Roman gangs circling through Port-au-Prince.
Let's Talk Legacy
The Enduring Enterprise Pt. 2, with Devin DeCiantis and Ivan Lansberg
So you recognize that with examples like this, that redundancy actually becomes a strategic asset as opposed to an expense that is frivolous and that needs to be reduced. Similarly for strategies like migration, it's really about resources.
Let's Talk Legacy
The Enduring Enterprise Pt. 2, with Devin DeCiantis and Ivan Lansberg
At some point in some circumstances, and we use and highlight a case from Syria of an enterprising family whose assets were essentially expropriated by the government in the 1960s. And they had to migrate.
Let's Talk Legacy
The Enduring Enterprise Pt. 2, with Devin DeCiantis and Ivan Lansberg
They essentially were forced to either live as civilians in the country, but not with the possibility of continuing to operate, or migrating to neighboring Lebanon and starting back up from scratch, using their social capital, their intellectual capital, to rebuild an empire that ended up becoming a regional champion once again.
Let's Talk Legacy
The Enduring Enterprise Pt. 2, with Devin DeCiantis and Ivan Lansberg
But in the face of a hostile environment that's no longer receptive to your ongoing presence there, In some points, you just need to pick up and go. You need to know when to hold them and when to fold them. And when it's time to fold them, you need to pick the appropriate destination for that journey. And I say that with a smile, knowing that you live in the CEO.
Let's Talk Legacy
The Enduring Enterprise Pt. 2, with Devin DeCiantis and Ivan Lansberg
That's a great question. And I'd be curious to go back and hear how your other guests have answered. In my perspective, when I think about legacy, I think about bringing forward into the present and carrying into the future those aspects or elements of our shared heritage that we want to celebrate and that we want to sustain.
Let's Talk Legacy
The Enduring Enterprise Pt. 2, with Devin DeCiantis and Ivan Lansberg
And it's also recognizing that the world around us is changing and the world in which those legacies were first established isn't necessarily the world of today or the world of tomorrow.
Let's Talk Legacy
The Enduring Enterprise Pt. 2, with Devin DeCiantis and Ivan Lansberg
And so that we need to also adapt that legacy and bring forth the elements that we truly appreciate, but embrace perhaps some novelty and innovation that wasn't ever conceived when the legacy was first established.
Let's Talk Legacy
The Enduring Enterprise Pt. 2, with Devin DeCiantis and Ivan Lansberg
I mean, I think they're inextricably intertwined, certainly at this age and stage in my career. You know, they're inseparable. Although I will say, you know, to the extent that we have personal lives outside of our professional lives, our most authentic selves will align those elements of your person that may be distinct from what's useful in your work. but it ought not to run across the grain.
Let's Talk Legacy
The Enduring Enterprise Pt. 2, with Devin DeCiantis and Ivan Lansberg
Otherwise, you're probably in the wrong profession.
Let's Talk Legacy
The Enduring Enterprise Pt. 2, with Devin DeCiantis and Ivan Lansberg
Well, thanks, Kerry. Should, at this point, be able to get the book pretty much anywhere? There's bookstores and Amazon and Audible and Kindle and all these other formats. At the end of the day, our aspiration with that was to get these ideas out to as many people as they could possibly benefit. We captured the ideas in the book to introduce these counterintuitive notions and to establish
Let's Talk Legacy
The Enduring Enterprise Pt. 2, with Devin DeCiantis and Ivan Lansberg
not only family businesses, but emerging and frontier economies as sources of inspiration for business leaders everywhere. And we really do hope that over the course of this, the conversation, as well as if folks end up picking up the book and having a read or taking a listen, that they are inspired to embrace some of these approaches.
Let's Talk Legacy
The Enduring Enterprise Pt. 2, with Devin DeCiantis and Ivan Lansberg
And if they ever want to reach out to us to talk about them or to think about how to apply them, they can reach us at at LGA or via LinkedIn or any of these other mechanisms of connecting. But most above all, we really hope these ideas are valuable and that folks are able to take them and do good work out there in the world.