Chairman's Message

Today’s family enterprises require Innovation, Leadership, Resilience and Sustainability. To precisely address this Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai has collaborated with Babson College, MA, USA to offer an extraordinary 11-months Global Post Graduate Program for Family Enterprises Management.

For the first time ever, world-class faculty from both Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai and Babson College, MA, USA will share their cutting-edge research and strategic insights to create a rigorous, relevant, and experiential curriculum. We aim to transform some of the sharpest and most enterprising minds of our country engaged in family enterprises to become future business leaders.

Your family has a successful business that you are now a part of. After your collegiate education, you’ve worked in the business for 2+ years. You have arrived at your next inflexion point and may have some of the following questions:

1. I have no other experience of working outside of the family business. Will this alone be sufficient to sustain and grow the business? Do I know everything that I need to in order to professionally administer and strategically advance the company?
2. How do I foster a work relationship with my cousins/other family members? We have to make tough decisions and may not always see eye to eye, but we need to keep the personal relationship intact at the same time.
3. How do I tell my parents that I don’t want to work in the legacy business or that I would like to explore a new business proposition?
4. I have an idea. What skillsets do I need to work on and strike it out on my own with a new start-up?
5. Will I earn the respect and the support of the stakeholders of the family members? Will they support any changes I introduce into the system? Will they accept the new leadership or will they expect me to maintain the status quo and chug along? How do I handle these sensitivities?

A family enterprise, as you have by now appreciated, combines a unique set of personal and business circumstances. The family enterprise deals with far more issues than the average corporation and hence there is a need for specific, customized learning modules that will enhance skillsets as well as expertise.

In today’s competitive environment of rapid technological changes and quickly evolving industries, disruptive start-ups interrupt the best laid plans and forecasts of family businesses. They can scale up businesses that previously took incumbent family enterprise decades to build. Indian family enterprises need to proactively prepare for it.

With professors from both the institutions, case studies, and a professional network of thought leaders, the Family Enterprises Management Program will give you the tools, skills, and mindset to tackle Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity (VUCA) of business environment and drive change in a sustainable manner.

As the leader of the family enterprises that is headed into the VUCA world of turbulent competition, it is important that you cultivate diverse skillsets. You will need to assimilate a wider spectrum of knowledge, expertise and relationships to augment your family business experience.

Academic elegance blended with Business Relevance is at the heart of our Family Enterprises Management Program. Moreover, a unique atmosphere of Gurukulam type of learning, set in rejuvenating and pristine surroundings in our state-of-the art LEED platinum rated campus at Chennai will give you all the answers you seek and place you on a trajectory of unprecedented growth and achievement. Sounds exciting? Well, come and join us and be the change that you want to see in your family enterprises!