Traits of Innovators

Peter Jaskiewicz talks about family business innovators, and how their vision and connection to the business are great assets.

They are very, very familiar with the history of the business, with the good and the bad. They know about the great entrepreneurial spirit that maybe their great-great-great-great grandparents showed, and they also know about the hard times that the family has survived. It makes it easier for them, when they face a hurdle in life to say, wow this is a big hurdle but when I look at my grandfather, or my great-great-grandfather, their hurdles were much higher, it makes it easier for them to try to climb that hurdle, and to know there were family members who managed over hundreds of years to manage such hurdles, gives them confidence that they are able to do so too. The other thing is that they are really identifying with what’s happening there. We’ve had people that went to top schools across the world, top MBA programs, and their friends were going to Goldman Sachs or they’re going to Proctor & Gamble and they’re saying we’re going back to the family business, and their friends were laughing. But then they brought these people to the winery, in this case, to the business and said look, we introduced this technology, we did this, we’re having this chemical lab here, we’re exporting to 75 countries, these people were impressed, said wow, we didn’t know right? And said, I did part of that, part of the ideas I came up with. I think they were confident in their own skills, they were proactive and they are definitely proud of what the family has achieved, and visionary in the things they could foresee to introduce in the business.