What Indian Family Businesses Can Teach Musk

Many successful family business founders and their successors within the family have had lofty goals and audacious business objectives. They have never shied away from challenges. In their journey, they have had to constantly concept sell to their stakeholders to buy into their vision

- Srinath Sridharan

THE MAJORITY OF INDIAN businesses are either family-run or promoter-led. The Indian family business concept can be traced back many centuries. India has a lot of learnings to share from its family-led businesses. They have seen much volatility, wars and invasions, strifes and strikes, and yet gone ahead to scale the markets. Indian family business leadership has many a transformation-lesson for leaders like Elon Musk.

The Indian family businesses, in general, have a strong culture that binds the teams and the organisation, including the external stakeholders who work with them. Most of these cultural and behavioural traits have been led by the founders and subsequent generations have then built on that base. These traits create a sense of purpose and bring the teams together, notwithstanding the quirks and idiosyncrasies that many of these individual founders may have or had. Many of these businesses have been professionalising their entities by bringing in external leaders, and yet have managed to maintain their ethos and cultural moorings. They have also been able to integrate external professionals into their organisational fold.

However, a strong organisational culture can also be a hindrance to change in management. In an ever-changing business environment, where digital transformation and business model disruptions are a must, the family businesses have to introspect on the changing purpose-culture-change-customer matrices. They have to organise the necessary change management initiatives to be relevant in the markets and to the customers they (aim to) serve.

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