Let's Talk Legacy
The Enduring Enterprise Pt. 2, with Devin DeCiantis and Ivan Lansberg
Wed, 05 Feb 2025
Devin DeCiantis and Ivan Lansberg, the Managing Partner and co-founder respectively of Lansberg Gersick Advisors, continue the discussion of their new book, THE ENDURING ENTERPRISE: How Family Businesses Thrive in Turbulent Conditions, including the possible consequences of the latest US election on family businesses, 7 stabilizing strategies for businesses and organizations, and weighing the "I" vs the "we".
Legacy means a lot of things to a lot of people. To some, it's lasting integrity. It's building and maintaining a history of greatness. It's making an impact on people and community. For others, it's dependable security and assurance in an uncertain time. To us, it's all of that and more. It's a mindset, a brother and sisterhood of hardworking people dedicated to doing the
right thing for you and those you care about of growing today for a better tomorrow that's what legacy means at southwestern legacy insurance group what does it mean to you let's talk legacy
In this episode, host Gary Michaels welcomes back Devin DeSantis and Yvonne Landsberg, the managing partner and co-founder, respectively, of Landsberg Gursic Advisors, trusted advisory and education partner to the world's leading family enterprises. The pair continue to discuss their new book, The Enduring Enterprise, How Family Businesses Thrive in Turbulent Conditions.
So we don't really like to, on this show, get too political or take sides on anything. But just looking at it objectively, this book was written before the most recent U.S. presidential election. And that election is now over. And it means a change in the administration and possible big changes to business.
Does that change anything in the book for you or change what you think the outlook is for family businesses in the United States? And if so, or if not, what impact do you believe this will have going forward?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
The other thing I think this change highlights for me, and I think the book certainly builds on this concern, is that let's say you take Elon Musk and have him moving to government to cut all the inefficiencies, so to speak. And I'm all for having an efficient government. I think that's terrific. The concept is very nice.
But before you move in with a chainsaw, you really need to pay attention for why those inefficiencies are built into the system. And because if you cut them all away, you're basically jacking up risk. That the institutional stabilizers, as we call them in the book, will begin to wither. And before you know it, the U.S.
is going to start beginning to look more like Guatemala, you know, in terms of its ability. And for business people, the implications are huge, like you're pointing out. Exactly. You know, I mean, what will the stars do to our game? What will, you know, what will happen when we can't count on, you know, in FEMA to rescue people after a tornado goes by?
I mean, once you take all that away, if you just slash and burn, you're going to be left with just a skeleton or something that really does expose the construct of the U.S. to enormous risk.
It goes back to risk and reward again. What's the risk and what's the reward? And if our world can get to a spot where we're sitting at the table, whether you're left or right, and you're fully saying what's going to be the best for the world long term, that's why we all do what we do, right? What's a good middle ground that will be the best for most people?
Learning from all this, you guys have actually come up with seven stabilizing strategies. And I love lists. They can help any organization increase its resilience and performance. Would you guys mind sharing those?
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Right. I was just thinking that. But, you know, I think one key point, Gary, is that it runs through all of the strategies. None of them come for free. And business owners are so focused on their operating models appropriately, right?
So, you know, you're running a company, 90% of your attention is making sure, you know, the product goes out the door, the service is provided, and everything is done in the most cost-effective manner possible. But if you overlook also pausing
And asking yourself, what risks are we taking and what measures might we build into our operating models to be able to cushion uncertainty, which will come your way, one way or another. You know, whether it's 9-11, whether it's COVID, whether it is, you know, the new administration, whatever it is. Something's going to affect and touch your business.
You better be ready for that and understand that any one of those measures, like a spare tire in a car, will take some resources, will occupy space, will weigh you down a little bit. But in exchange for that, you're upping the chances of continuity, which for most family enterprises, I'm very much in tune with your legacy constructs, is key. That is a key priority.
So if you want to continue, you better be attentive to risk.
So as you guys know, our insurance companies called Southwestern Legacy Insurance Group, thus Let's Talk Legacy. Legacy is such an important part to what we do every day. And when a person purchases insurance, it's because they want to leave a legacy for somebody behind. It's always an interest to us to understand what legacy means to each and every person that we speak with every day.
And I'd be curious to each of you guys what legacy means to you.
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.
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.
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.
And to me, I became a grandfather seven years ago. And to me, that is a very important motivation to try and reflect on what can I pass on to my grandchildren that... will endure? You know, what are the stories? What are the values?
What are the strategies that I've seen worked and that this work actually reflects, you know, an inventory of that could be useful to them as they will tackle the world they will inherit with full knowledge that that world, as Devin suggests, will be quite different from the one I've lived.
Absolutely. Do either of you feel that your personal legacies are any different than your work legacies? That's a great question.
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.
Otherwise, you're probably in the wrong profession.
The reason that I asked that question is I've seen so much lately, so many famous business people, athletes, even executives in companies there for the first time in years start to build their own individual brand, even within that company. And it's them letting the world know who they are, what their legacy is in the combination of the company or the environment that they're in.
That's why I asked you guys, do you have some personal legacies that you'd like to see accomplished?
Yeah, I know. It's a great question, and I had two thoughts on that. One is, you know, there is something so important in families because you're constantly managing the relationship between the I, who I am as an individual, and the we, the identity that we hold together as a group, right? So that tension is inherently built into families. The other thought I had about this was –
A story that I think Warren Buffett tells about, you know, sometimes they ask him, so how do you define success? And then he says that the person who dies with the most friends. And then they asked him, so how do you define a friend? And then he says, well, a friend is... And then he notes a friend of his who went through the Holocaust, right? Right.
And says, a friend is somebody who will hide you, meaning somebody who will have enough conviction and commitment to you to take a personal risk on your behalf.
An advocate, basically.
An advocate, right? An advocate who will protect you when the time comes. Our emphasis on family and on risk, basically, in the book, it really comes from being exposed to families worldwide in the US, in Europe, in Asia, in Latin America, in Africa, that are just
exemplary at managing that tension and being able to call forth a collective identity that allows them to get, you know, that gives them the resiliency they need to cope with the challenges they face.
Well, you guys have your new book out now, The Enduring Enterprise. Tell us just briefly about the book and where people can get the book and then also how they can reach the two of you if they want to learn more about your company and the work that you do.
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
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.
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.
Yeah, we believe in the power of ideas. And the book is really our attempt at trying to summarize that experience and share them with others. You know, as we often think about this, it continues to be a work in progress. We don't pretend to have all the answers here, but we do want to get people curious about how important continuity and resiliency are in building legacies.
Is there a website or a phone number that they can reach you all?
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.
Thank you, Garrett.
Thank you, Garrett.
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Let's Talk Legacy is a presentation of the Southwestern Legacy Insurance Group, a member of Southwestern Family of Companies.