Firmenich: Juggling the short and the long term (Cartoon case)
Formatted like a comic-strip, this case showcases how Firmenich achieved resilience and strong sustainability commitments thanks to its family ownership. The case investigates how family ownership spanning across four generations and 125 years, has influenced the company’s core values and brought a long-term perspective to its strategy, which allowed sustainability, diversity, and inclusion on the executives’ agenda many decades before its peers. The case concludes by illustrating how these core foundational values allowed Firmenich to weather the COVID-19 storm by prompting the organization to react very rapidly, in a display of strong resilience. Firmenich is the winner of the 2019 IMD-Pictet Sustainability in Family Business Award.
- The case aims to illustrate how family businesses tend to have core foundational beliefs that support strong, long-standing sustainability commitments.
Firmenich, Consumer Goods, Cosmetics and Perfumes, Consumer Goods, Food and Beverage
2020
Cranfield University
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The literature indicates that the board of directors exists to provide resources and strategic direction (service task) and monitor top managers (control task), often tending to overgeneralize board tasks. Using a unique sample of 36 elite family ...
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in Journal of Management Studies November 2024, vol. 61, no. 7, pp. 2814-2848, https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12990
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