The next decade will test more than the wealth of entrepreneurial families. It will test whether they can reinvent what they built, raise successors capable of judgement, and keep the human core of their companies intact while machines take on more of the thinking.
For fourteen centuries, one Japanese family built temples. Kongō Gumi was founded in Osaka in 578 and stayed under family control for roughly forty generations. It outlasted shoguns, civil wars, the Meiji Restoration and the destruction of World War II. It did not survive the property bubble. The company borrowed heavily in the 1980s to move beyond its craft and was left with debts it could not service. In 2006 it was absorbed by a larger construction group. I return to this story often because it cuts against two lazy views of family business at once. One holds that it is a quaint survival from a slower age. The other holds that longevity is its own guarantee. Family enterprises can last longer than empires. They can also lose in one generation what forty generations preserved.
Every industrial revolution has produced new fortunes and humbled old ones. Steam, electricity, the assembly line and the microchip each rewrote the relationship between capital, labour and society. Each sorted families as ruthlessly as it sorted companies. Some dynasties adapted and grew. Others found that wealth accumulated by one generation was surprisingly fragile in the hands of the next.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution will do the same sorting, only faster. Artificial intelligence is moving from a tool that helps people work to a system that takes part in decisions. Robotics is redrawing the economics of manufacturing. Biotechnology is opening markets in health and longevity that barely existed a decade ago. Digital platforms are compressing margins in industries that once felt safe. And geopolitics has walked back into the boardroom. Supply chains, chips, energy and inbound investment are now matters of national security, so a family’s commercial choices can carry political consequences in three capitals at once.
For entrepreneurial families, the challenge is economic and generational, and in the end it is human. How do you prepare a business for a world that may look very different by the time your children run it? How do you keep the values that made the family successful without becoming captive to the business model that made it rich? And how do you make sure technology strengthens the relationships family firms have always depended on, rather than hollowing them out?
Another digital transformation programme or another succession plan will not be enough. What families need is closer to a new settlement, a Family Business New Deal for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. By that I mean a fresh understanding of what owning families owe their companies, their successors, their employees and the societies around them. It also means a different way of connecting patient capital, technological change and human responsibility.
The timing matters. Governments are absorbed by what we have learned to call polycrisis and permacrisis. They manage one emergency after another, with little room to think a decade ahead. In that vacuum, entrepreneurial families can offer something that has become oddly scarce in public life: leadership with a long horizon.
Why continuity now depends on reinvention
Family businesses have one structural advantage that is easy to underestimate: their relationship with time. A listed company struggles to defend investments that pay off after the current chief executive has left. A private equity fund works to an exit date. A family, at least in principle, can think in generations, and the best ones do. That horizon allows patient capital and long relationships with suppliers and communities. It also allows investment in reputation and the slow building of capabilities that will not show up in next year’s results.
The same attachment to continuity can turn into resistance to change. The founder who disrupted an industry at thirty can become, at seventy, the guardian of the model he once overturned. The second generation professionalises the company. The third inherits a sophisticated organisation whose advantages are quietly wearing away. Often nobody in the family notices until the numbers do.
Many great family firms were early adopters in their day. Their founders saw opportunities before competitors did, embraced new methods of production or invented new ways to reach customers. The coming decade will not reward that history. It will reward the capacity to do it again. The question every family should be asking is less about what the next generation will inherit and more about what it will be able to reinvent.
From guarding wealth to preparing a future
Most established business families have built careful machinery for managing ownership, dividends, governance, investments and succession. Very few have anything comparable for discussing where technology and geopolitics are taking their industries.
Imagine the agenda of a family council that took this seriously. It would ask how much of the current business AI could erode within ten years. It would ask which of the group’s advantages will grow stronger with technology and which will simply stop mattering. It would ask whether the family is putting enough money into activities that earn little today, and whether it would cannibalise a profitable division now to protect its position later. It would weigh keeping control of every operating company against staying relevant by moving into new sectors. It would consider what happens when the best idea in the room comes from a 26-year-old cousin rather than the chairman. The same goes for an outside executive who understands a technology nobody in the family fully grasps. Underneath all of this sits the hardest question: are we raising our children to inherit wealth, or to exercise judgement?
None of these questions can be fully handed to consultants, IT departments or bankers. They touch the identity of the enterprise itself.
Through the Superclans research programme, I have spent a good deal of time studying how entrepreneurial families build, protect and lose wealth and influence across generations. The families I find most interesting are not always the richest. They are the ones that have shown, more than once, that they can create new value, acquire new capabilities and stay relevant as the world shifts beneath them. The coming decade will make that difference sharper than it has been for a long time. A family legacy can become a museum of past success or a platform for future entrepreneurship. The choice is rarely made in one dramatic moment. It is made in hundreds of small decisions about where to invest attention and money.
What family capitalism around the world can teach us
There is no single winning model of family capitalism. Different regions have developed different strengths, and each carries lessons for the decade ahead.
German and Central European industrial families built the Mittelstand, with its engineering depth, specialist manufacturing, apprenticeship systems and long, loyal relationships with suppliers and workers. Some of Germany’s most important companies are controlled through foundations designed precisely to protect the long view, Bosch being the obvious example. That tradition remains one of Europe’s great economic assets. It now has to cope with faster technology cycles, an ageing workforce, expensive industrial energy and rivals that move at a very different speed.
Indian business families show how multigenerational continuity can be combined with diversification, scale and international ambition. They also show how much governance matters as groups grow. In 2023 Mukesh Ambani brought his three children onto the Reliance board, each already associated with a different part of the group. It was a public signal that succession in a conglomerate is as much about architecture as about heirs.
Chinese private entrepreneurs work amid fierce technological competition and a shifting relationship between the state and private capital. Their experience shows the value of speed and adaptability, and the risks of concentrated political and market exposure. South Korea’s chaebol show what sustained industrial ambition and coordinated investment can achieve. They also show how succession battles, weak governance and concentrated power can damage even the strongest groups. When Samsung’s heirs inherited Lee Kun-hee’s estate in 2020, the tax bill alone ran to roughly 12 trillion won. Transfers of control at that scale are also national events.
Japan offers the virtues of patience, craftsmanship and reputation, along with the warning of Kongō Gumi that incremental improvement is not always enough. Latin American family groups learned resilience the hard way, through political turbulence, currency crises and repeated recessions. Their reliance on relationships, diversification and quick adaptation is useful knowledge for anyone working in an unpredictable environment. In the Gulf, family groups are central to economic diversification, expanding abroad and professionalising their governance and wealth management at speed. African business families have the opportunities of demographic growth, digital leapfrogging and regional integration. They also face persistent gaps in infrastructure, institutions and access to capital.
My own region deserves a place on this map. In Romania and much of Central and Eastern Europe, the companies founded in the 1990s are reaching their first real transfer between generations. Their founders built businesses in a market that was inventing itself, usually with no domestic model of family capitalism to follow. Their children were often educated abroad and speak the language of technology and venture capital. They do not always want to run a distribution company or a building-materials chain. How this generation handles the handover will shape the region’s private economy for the next thirty years, and very few families are discussing it openly.
No model is universally superior. The successful global family enterprise of the 2030s will probably borrow from several. It might take German engineering discipline, Indian entrepreneurial reach, Chinese speed, Japanese patience, Korean industrial coordination, Latin American agility and the global investment outlook now visible among Gulf family offices. It will be rooted at home and informed globally.
That also gives families room to learn from each other more deliberately. Partnerships between families on different continents could become serious vehicles for investment, technology transfer and market entry. Because both sides tend to think in decades, such alliances can outlast the careers of the people who negotiate them. Making them work takes more than ambition, though. It takes good information, trusted relationships, political literacy and institutional credibility, plus the ability to spot an opportunity before it becomes obvious. In a fragmenting world, globalisation will reward families who know where to invest and also whom to trust.
AI is not just another line in the capex budget
For many family businesses, artificial intelligence first arrives as a familiar management problem. The task looks like finding practical uses, lifting productivity, cutting costs, automating repetitive work and improving customer service. All of that is legitimate, and all of it is only the first stage.
AI is changing the economics of expertise, the organisation of work and the shape of competition. A small company with strong AI capabilities can challenge an incumbent whose advantage rested on scale, specialist knowledge or control of distribution. A family office can now run analysis that only a large bank could afford a few years ago. A manufacturer may find that its most valuable asset is not its machinery but forty years of proprietary process data sitting unused on its servers. At the same time, dependence on a handful of outside technology providers creates new exposure. Data security, intellectual property, strategic autonomy and bargaining power are all at stake.
So the question is how AI will redraw the industry, as well as how a family business uses it. Harder questions sit behind that one. If AI makes a large part of the workforce less necessary, how are the productivity gains shared? What does the company owe the people who spent decades building it? Which decisions should stay human even when a machine can make them faster?
An algorithm can recommend closing a plant. It falls to the family to decide what it owes the town that has depended on that plant for three generations. A model can find the optimal restructuring. It cannot tell a family what it considers fair, honourable or consistent with its name. Technology improves the information in front of leaders, but it does not do the leading. In family firms, reputation, identity and responsibility are bound tightly together, so that distinction carries real weight.
Succession when the successor understands the technology better
For generations, succession has meant transferring ownership, management authority and control. Those questions still matter. In this decade, though, succession must also transfer something harder to define: the ability to operate in a world the older generation may not fully understand.
Successors still need financial literacy and operational experience. They need an understanding of governance, negotiating skill and a feel for the family’s history. They increasingly also need technological fluency, geopolitical awareness and international networks of their own. They need the discernment to tell genuine innovation from fashion, and they have to understand AI without becoming intellectually dependent on it. They will lead organisations whose employees may have to reinvent their careers several times. They also need the nerve to challenge what they were taught.
The old succession question was who will lead the company after me. The better question is who will be able to transform it after me, and whether that person has been given room to do so.
This means widening the roles open to family members, because not every heir should be CEO. A future family leader might be an investor, a technology founder or a philanthropist. They might act as a steward of family governance or build international partnerships. Professional managers may be better placed to run the operating companies, while family shareholders concentrate on direction, values and capital allocation. The hard part is separating ownership, stewardship and executive leadership without draining the family’s identity from the business. The aim is to keep the family’s capacity for entrepreneurship alive, not to clone the founder.
The questions families would rather not ask
It would be a mistake to romanticise family capitalism. Family ownership does not automatically produce better governance, more social responsibility or wiser long-term decisions. Nepotism erodes meritocracy, and feuds freeze strategy. Concentrated authority drives away good executives. Emotional attachment to inherited assets can block a restructuring that should have happened years earlier. The wish to keep control can quietly become more important than the health of the company itself. Consider the long, public fight over the Murdoch family trust, settled only in 2025 after a court battle in Nevada. It showed how an arrangement meant to secure continuity can become the source of the very instability it was meant to prevent.
Rapid technological change makes these weaknesses more dangerous. When technology moves fast, the speed of decisions matters. When new skills become essential, merit matters. When international expansion adds complexity, professional governance matters.
Families serious about the next decade should be willing to answer some blunt questions honestly. Would we hire our current CEO if they were not family? Would we buy this business today if we did not already own it? Are our independent directors actually independent? Can the younger generation challenge the current leadership without being seen as disloyal? Is our unity built on trust, or on a tacit agreement to avoid difficult conversations? What happens if the founder cannot lead tomorrow morning? And do we have a plan in case our children do not want to run the business at all?
Any New Deal worth the name begins with that kind of honesty. Continuity without accountability turns into entitlement, and tradition without adaptation turns into stagnation. A family that cannot disagree openly has not achieved unity. It has achieved a well-mannered form of paralysis.
Towards a new social contract
All of this is happening amid geopolitical fragmentation, economic insecurity, demographic decline, polarisation and falling trust in institutions. For business leaders these are not abstractions. They shape investment decisions, employee expectations, supply chains, consumer confidence and the basic ability to plan.
They also leave a leadership gap. Governments are pulled towards the next election and the next emergency. Regulators struggle with technologies that change faster than rules can be written. Citizens are reasonably anxious about who will bear the costs of transformation and who will collect the gains.
Who will help negotiate the next social contract? Technology companies obviously have a role. So do governments and international institutions, trade unions, universities and civil society. Entrepreneurial families can make a distinctive contribution too. They combine economic weight with roots in particular places, long-lasting ownership and often a personal stake in the consequences of their decisions. A family that has owned an industrial company for four generations tends to see the surrounding town differently from an investor holding a stake for four years.
That does not make family ownership inherently more responsible. History is full of exploitative family capitalism, opaque governance and inherited privilege. But it does open the way to a different kind of leadership.
A Family Business New Deal should include renewed commitments to employees whose skills need upgrading. It should extend the same commitment to communities exposed to technological disruption and to young people looking for meaningful work. It should treat productivity gains from AI as a question about training, wages and working conditions, as well as returns to shareholders. It should encourage families to invest in education, research and local innovation ecosystems, the institutions that make economic progress socially sustainable. It should also push families to check whether their philanthropy, their investment portfolios and their operating companies are pulling in the same direction. A family cannot credibly speak of its duty to future generations while its businesses steadily undermine the social and environmental conditions those generations will inherit.
Surviving the next industrial revolution is the minimum ambition. The more interesting ambition is helping to make it worth surviving.
LEAD21 and the Human Quotient
At a TEDx event in Brussels, I presented a leadership framework I call LEAD21. It rests on three dimensions, Soul, Spirit and Singularity, held together by what I describe as the Human Quotient, or HQ.
Soul is about empathy, responsibility and understanding the human consequences of our decisions. Spirit is about purpose, courage and the ability to inspire others, especially those who come after us. Singularity is about embracing the extraordinary potential of artificial intelligence while keeping human judgement at the centre of leadership. The Human Quotient ties them together. It names the qualities that make a leader worth following once intelligence itself becomes abundant and cheap.
For business families, this is more than a leadership theory. A family enterprise is a living relationship between generations, with all their ambitions, memories and obligations. Technology will change how these companies compete. It will also change how owners lead, how successors form their identities and how families hold on to a shared sense of purpose.
The next generation will certainly need technological intelligence. It will need a higher Human Quotient just as much. That means the ability to judge, build trust, handle conflict, take responsibility and stay recognisably human as machines shape more of the environment. As AI spreads access to analysis, trusted human judgement is likely to become a more valuable competitive asset. Families should be careful not to confuse technological sophistication with leadership maturity. Nor should they assume that a talent for making money brings the wisdom to steward it. AI can make a family business smarter, but only its people can decide what it should be smarter for.
Family Business New Deal 2036: a decade in three stages
How might these ideas become a working strategy? I would propose a decade of deliberate transformation in three stages.
The first stage, from 2026 to 2028, is about understanding, challenging and preparing. Every serious family enterprise should begin with an honest review of four things: its exposure to technology, the state of its governance, its readiness for succession and its geopolitical vulnerabilities. It needs to know which business lines face the greatest disruption and where new growth is emerging. It needs to know whether the right capabilities are around the table. It also needs to know whether its governance was designed for the company it is today or the one it needs to become. This is the moment to give the conversation between generations some structure. Younger family members should do more than observe. They should propose investments, challenge assumptions and lead carefully designed experiments. Family councils could create technology and future-readiness committees with independent expertise. The aim is not to change everything at once. It is to reach a shared view of what must be preserved, what must change and how much risk the family is willing to carry.
The second stage, from 2029 to 2032, is about reinvention, investment and internationalisation. By then, experimentation should have matured into disciplined investment. Families will need to modernise their core businesses while building exposure to new technologies, markets and business models. Some will do it through corporate venture arms or acquisitions. Others will use partnerships with universities and technology firms, or a family office deliberately diversifying into new sectors. Internationalisation belongs at the heart of this stage. That is especially true for companies whose home markets are becoming too small, too crowded or too politically uncertain. Expanding abroad should mean more than opening offices. It should mean building global intelligence, cross-border relationships and the capacity to work across different economic and political systems. This is also when succession should move from preparation to real responsibility. The next generation should be making consequential decisions well before it inherits final authority.
The third stage, from 2033 to 2036, is about making renewal permanent and widening the legacy. By the middle of the next decade, the goal is an enterprise that can renew itself continuously, which is worth more than an upgraded company. Governance should support innovation without loosening accountability. Family members should understand their rights and their duties. Professional managers should have real authority, and successors should be chosen for competence rather than birth order. The family should also be able to show what its success adds beyond its own balance sheet. That includes how many employees gained new skills, how much innovation the enterprise backed and what openings it created for the next generation of entrepreneurs. It also includes how resilient its communities have become. The most ambitious families will go further. They will use their international networks to build partnerships in education, responsible technology, sustainability and entrepreneurship across borders. A legacy is measured partly by what descendants inherit. It is also measured by what others were able to build because the family enterprise existed.
Why these conversations cannot be held in separate rooms
None of this can be delivered through technology spending or conventional succession planning alone. It requires a deeper conversation about what the family wants to become over the next ten, twenty or fifty years.
Some of the most consequential decisions sit where family governance, geopolitical risk, international expansion, technological change and next-generation leadership meet. In practice these questions are never separate, even if companies keep managing them in separate departments. Entering a new market changes the family’s risk exposure. Buying a technology company changes the skills its future leaders will need. A succession dispute can stall a promising expansion abroad for years. A geopolitical shock can force a family to rethink where its capital, its people and its most important relationships should sit.
This is why families need an integrated view of their future. Founders, successors, family councils, professional executives and trusted outside advisers should examine these questions together. The point is not another strategy document that gathers dust in the boardroom. It is an enterprise that can read uncertainty, see opportunity and renew itself without losing its sense of purpose. The families that do best will not necessarily have the largest advisory teams or the most elaborate governance charters. They will be the ones that ask the right questions early, listen to answers they dislike, and act before change becomes an emergency.
Renegotiating the family compact
Every business family lives by an implicit agreement between generations. The founders create. The successors inherit, preserve and ideally grow. The family provides capital, identity and continuity, and in return its members accept obligations to the enterprise and to one another.
This decade requires that agreement to be reopened. Senior generations have to accept that experience, however valuable, does not guarantee foresight about technology. Younger generations have to understand that digital fluency is no substitute for judgement, discipline or responsibility. Professional executives must be given room to lead. Family shareholders must resist confusing ownership with expertise. Above all, the family has to decide what its wealth and influence are ultimately for.
These are difficult conversations. They involve money, power, identity and emotion, and sometimes grievances that have built up over decades. Avoiding them is far more dangerous. The families most likely to thrive will combine continuity of purpose with a willingness to change their methods. They will keep their values without becoming prisoners of their traditions. They will adopt technology without surrendering their judgement. And they will prepare successors to create new value in circumstances no one can predict, not merely to manage inherited assets.
Humanity as the lasting advantage
As AI grows more capable, many forms of knowledge, analysis and even creativity will become plentiful. What may become scarce is trusted human judgement, empathy, responsibility and the ability to rally people around a shared purpose.
This is an argument for technology, provided it is used to extend human capability rather than to treat people as obstacles to efficiency. The families that get this right will understand that employees are more than costs and customers are more than data points. Communities are more than pins on an investment map. Trust, reputation and real relationships remain strategic assets, and they will become more valuable as automated information floods every channel.
Business families should feel this more keenly than most. A family business is, after all, an economic organisation built around one of humanity’s oldest institutions. Its deepest strength lies in connecting generations who see the world differently but remain committed to a common future. That capacity can be extended outwards, to employees, partners, communities and international networks. If it is, family enterprises can become serious contributors to a more humane technological age. Family ownership is not inherently superior. It does, however, have an unusual opportunity to align long-term economic ambition with long-term human responsibility.
The coming decade will test that opportunity. Some dynasties will protect yesterday’s success until it disappears. Others will chase technology so hard that they lose the values that made them distinctive. The ones worth watching will find a third path: technological ambition anchored in human purpose.
That is the Family Business New Deal we should be discussing. The next generation deserves more than a successful inheritance. It deserves a future worth inheriting. The real test of this industrial revolution may be less about how intelligent our machines become and more about how much of our humanity we choose to keep as they do.
Photo: Dreamstime.