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Podcast „Alles neu...? Aus dem Maschinenraum“
Spotlight-Episode #2 | Prof. Dr. Tom A. Rüsen: How to ensure a successful succession in family businesses
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Spotlight episode 2
Prof. Dr. Tom A. Rüsen: How to ensure a successful succession in family businesses
Prof. Dr. Tom A. Rüsen, Executive Director of WIFU-Foundation
Listen now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Episode description
A successful succession is one of the biggest strategic challenges facing small and medium-sized enterprises. Every year, tens of thousands of companies face a generational change – and with them entire value chains, jobs, and regional structures. But succession is more than just a formal handover date: in family businesses in particular, it is a complex, emotional, psychologically profound, and sometimes conflictual process that has a profound impact on the dynamics of entrepreneurial families.
In the second special spotlight episode of “Alles neu…? Aus dem Maschinenraum”, host and Maschinenraum Managing Director Tobias Rappers talks to Prof. Dr. Tom A. Rüsen, Executive Director of the WIFU Foundation he founded, about the key success factors for successful succession: From the question of why succession begins in childhood, to dealing with family expectations and conflicts, to roles, letting go, and the difference between internal and external succession.
With practical examples, voices from family entrepreneurs from previous episodes of “Alles Neu... Aus dem Maschinenraum” and clear classifications, the episode shows how family businesses can systematically shape succession.
In Spotlight, we delve deeper into the topics that move family businesses – directly from the practice of Maschinenraum. As an ecosystem of around 80 medium-sized companies, it pools experiences and questions that are relevant in everyday business: from the shortage of skilled workers to digital transformation to cultural change. These very observations from practice form the starting point for in-depth conversations with host Tobias Rappers and experts who put them into context and make solutions tangible. This creates episodes that are close to the challenges companies face and show that the future emerges where we look more closely and take action together. That is exactly where Spotlight belongs.
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Prof. Dr. Tom A. Rüsen
Prof. Dr. Tom A. Rüsen is the managing director of the non-profit WIFU Foundation, which he founded in 2009. Until 2024, he was the director of the WIFU Institute for Family Business at Witten/Herdecke University for 16 years. Since 2015, he has been an honorary professor at the Faculty of Economics at the University of Witten/Herdecke, and since 2017, a visiting professor at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. His research, teaching, and publications focus on the study of conflict and crisis dynamics in the families and businesses of family-owned companies and the development of practical solutions for creating structures that promote longevity and resilience within entrepreneurial families.
About the Spotlight Episodes
In Spotlight, we delve deeper into the topics that move family businesses – directly from the practice of Maschinenraum. As an ecosystem of around 80 medium-sized companies, it pools experiences and questions that are relevant in everyday business: from the shortage of skilled workers to digital transformation to cultural change. These very observations from practice form the starting point for in-depth conversations with host Tobias Rappers and experts who put them into context and make solutions tangible. This creates episodes that are close to the challenges companies face and show that the future emerges where we look more closely and take action together. That is exactly where Spotlight belongs.
In our regular episodes, Tobias Rappers, Managing Director of Maschinenraum, and Katja Michel, Editor of the business magazine Capital, talk to thought leaders and makers from the heart of the German economy and focus on the personalities and their motivation.
*The podcast is in German.
For more episodes of “Alles neu...? Aus dem Maschinenraum“ please click here!
