Keynote Case Study: DePaul University EFBC: What Worked In The Past Could Become The Anchor.

Jim Carroll’s keynote focused on the challenge facing family-run and mid-sized enterprises for DePaul University’s Entrepreneur Family and Business Council in Chicago, as disruption, technology, new competitors and rapidly changing customer expectations accelerated.

The keynote, “What Worked In The Past Could Become The Anchor,” laid out the challenge and the path forward.

Family enterprises had deep history and strong operating habits — but those strengths could become constraints when markets moved faster.

Six trends are shaping that shift.

• Business Model Disruption. Established ways of creating value could be challenged quickly by new models and market structures.
• New Competitors. Small, fast entrants could appear from outside the traditional competitive set and reset expectations.
• Technology Acceleration. Every industry was increasingly shaped by faster digital capability, connectivity and automation.
• Collapsing Product Lifecycles. Products and services were moving from new to obsolete faster, forcing shorter planning and innovation cycles.
• Customer Complexity. Customers were arriving with higher expectations, more information and rapidly shifting definitions of value.
• Family-Enterprise Agility. The advantage of a mid-sized family business could be its ability to decide, experiment and move quickly.

The legacy that built the business, Jim told the Chicago audience, should be a platform for the future — not an anchor to the past.

Preserve the strengths of the enterprise, Jim’s message went, but never let legacy assumptions prevent fast alignment to the next wave of change. Explore more keynote case studies.