Please note that this is an on-going project.
Project Description
The book ‘Family businesses on a mission: Attaining the Sustainable Development Goal of Quality Education’ focuses on how family businesses on an international basis can align themselves to SDG#4.
It features case studies of family businesses from Australia, Algeria, USA and Austria.
Project Personnel and Beneficiaries
Family businesses can and do make an important contribution to the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). There is limited prior research on how family businesses incorporate the SDGs in the creation and redefinition of their purpose and operations, however, the book series provides case studies that demonstrate how family businesses do this.
Outcomes to Date
We have found that SDGs provided external validation for strategic choice of the purpose of a family business’s core activities and provided benchmarks from which family businesses could reflect on performance and plan future activities aligned with the SDGs. In observing the strategies, the family businesses have adopted to ensure that sustainability and the SDGs are part of the family businesses thinking, many family businesses have adopted the strategy of having sustainability as an agenda item on the Board of Directors’ agenda. This ensures that top management address the issue of family business practices for developing a sustainable future. Through this case study series, we would hope that other family businesses would have role models to benchmark their investment in the sustainable future of their own family business and see the positive impact they have then made on society in general.
Project Significance
The book, which is part of a 17-book series on each of the SDGs is important because we reveal that family businesses that align their business purpose with the SDGs undergo a strategic process of reflection upon business purpose. By investing in practices, training and education, the family business is harnessing the power for good, and they subsequently can craft a business model that looks after people and the planet for generations to come.