286 Rob Lachenauer: How to Maintain a Family Business

About Rob Lachenauer

From the Banyan website:

Partner & CEO

Throughout his career, Rob Lachenauer, a Partner, and CEO at BanyanGlobal has been both a consultant and entrepreneur.

Rob Lachenauer

As a consultant, he was a Vice President and Director of The Boston Consulting Group from 1995 to 2004 and helped to lead multi-national companies, including several family-controlled businesses, set and implement growth strategies. He has experience with industrial, distribution, consumer goods, financial, technology, and automotive firms.

Rob Lachenauer has consulted for clients in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. With George Stalk, he co-authored a book about competition strategies, Hardball: Are You Playing to Play or Playing to Win, published by Harvard Business School Press in 2004 and subsequently translated into six languages. He currently writes a blog for Harvard Business Review with Banyan Partner Josh Baron. From 2010 to 2012, he was a Partner and CEO of Cambridge Advisors to Family Enterprise, where he worked with leading family businesses around the world and helped grow the firm by more than 70%.

As an entrepreneur, Rob Lachenauer co-founded and became CEO of GEO2 Technologies, a material science licensing company that developed, patented, and out-licensed its Cross Linked Microstructure for diesel emissions filter applications. At GEO2, he established the product development and IP strategies, built the technical and business team, raised its capital, and led its license negotiations. Subsequently, he was the founding CEO and Chairman of the Board of Bio2 Technologies, which has developed load-bearing bio-active and bio-inert bone scaffolds.

Rob Lachenauer holds a BA from Cornell University and an MBA from Harvard University. He is a co-inventor on several U.S. patents. He lives with his wife and three daughters in Weston, Massachusetts.

Harvard Business Review Family Business Handbook: How to Build and Sustain a Successful, Enduring Enterprise (HBR Handbooks)

Navigate the complex decisions and critical relationships necessary to create and sustain a healthy family business—and business family.

Though “family business” may sound like it refers only to mom-and-pop shops, businesses owned by families are among the most significant and numerous in the world. But surprisingly few resources exist to help navigate the unique challenges you face when you share the executive suite, financial statements, and holidays. How do you make the right decisions, critical to the long-term survival of any business, with the added challenge of having to do so within the context of a family?

The HBR Family Business Handbook brings you sophisticated guidance and practical advice from family business experts Josh Baron and Rob Lachenauer. Drawing on their decades-long experience working closely with a wide range of family businesses of all sizes around the world, the authors present proven methods and approaches for communicating effectively, managing conflict, building the right governance structures, and more.

In the HBR Family Business Handbook you’ll find:

  • A new perspective on what makes family businesses succeed and fail
  • A framework to help you make good decisions together
  • Step-by-step guidance on managing change within your business family
  • Key questions about wealth, unique to family businesses, that you can’t afford to ignore
  • Assessments to help you determine where you are—and where you want to go
  • Stories of real companies, from Marchesi Antinori to Radio Flyer
  • Chapter summaries you can use to reinforce what you’ve learned

Keep this comprehensive guide with you to help you build, grow, and position your family business to thrive across generations.

HBR Handbooks provide ambitious professionals with the frameworks, advice, and tools they need to excel in their careers. With step-by-step guidance, time-honed best practices, and real-life stories, each comprehensive volume helps you to stand out from the pack—whatever your role.

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