#135—Devin DeCiantis: The Enduring Power of Family Businesses

Devin DeCiantis is the co-author, with Ivan Lansberg, of the 2024 book THE ENDURING ENTERPRISE: How Family Businesses Thrive in Turbulent Condition. He is a Managing Partner at Lansberg Gersick Advisors (LGA), an advisory and educational partner trusted by many of the world’s largest family enterprises.

 Devin’s work and focus is on the financial, organizational, and strategic aspects of this business structure—the family enterprise. Devin brings his background in corporate strategy, economic analysis and investment banking to his work with these family businesses, family offices and family foundations.  

Several unique attributes family businesses set them apart from the various corporate forms, public or private, corporations or LLCs or partnership. Many of these differences build a natural immunity and competitive advantage of sorts that traditional corporations struggle to build.  

In this episode, we discuss some the key findings in his book, including:  

• What enduring lessons family businesses can teach regular corporations about planning for not just quarters, but quarter-centuries 
• The unique advantages—and weaknesses—of family businesses, whose longevity often span decades, or even centuries 
• The unique role family businesses play in economies, especially in markets like South Asia, East Asia, and Latin America 
• The 7 stabilizing strategies that these businesses employ effectively, as they often are built amidst emerging and frontier economies where basic infrastructure and resources are often lacking 

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Episode Timeline:

00:00—Highlight from today's episode
01:31—Introducing Devin + the topic of today’s episode
03:29—If you really know me, you know that...
04:20—What is your definition of strategy?
06:30—Historical context of family owned businesses
08:55—Examples of major family owned businesses
10:58—What motivated Devin to study family businesses
13:08—Family owned businesses in more volatile environments
16:06—7 stabilizing strategies family owned businesses consistently deploy
17:51—Differentiation strategy
20:31—Resilience in family-owned enterprises
23:08—Modularity as core driver of growth and stability
26:33—How family owned businesses benefit from modularity
29:26—How non-family-owned organizations can leverage modularity 
31:24—Strategic redundancy in family owned businesses
33:44—How can people follow you and continue learning from you? 

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Additional Resources:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/devindeciantis
Link to book: THE ENDURING ENTERPRISE

Thank you to our guest. Thank you to our executive producer, Karina Reyes, our editor, Zach Ness, and the rest of the team. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. I'm your host, Kaihan Krippendorff. Thank you for listening.

Follow us at outthinkernetworks.com/podcast

Transcript

Kaihan Krippendorff: Devin, thank you so much for taking the time to sit down with us. Really enjoyed your book, and I'm looking forward to diving into at least some of it.

Devin DeCiantis: Thanks so much.

Kaihan Krippendorff: Let's start with the same two questions. I ask all of our guests. The first one is just for us to get to know you a little bit more personally, could you complete the sentence for me? If you really know me, you know that.

Devin DeCiantis: I am deeply curious. You know, over the years, this has really translated into a wide range of interests and hobbies, actually many of which informed our research and writing of the book. That's goes from economics and political science to evolutionary biology and competitive sport, astronomy, and music. All these disparate domains actually compete for my attention and my time, and it's actually part of what makes me admire folks like you get to interview a vast array of people from all walks of life, and tease out both of you. Inspiring diversity and the reassuring familiarity of the human experience.

Kaihan Krippendorff: The reassuring familiarity. I love that. Can explore the things that you're curious about. Let's zoom in on strategy since that's our primary topic of this podcast. What's your definition of strategy?

Devin DeCiantis: Sure. I think it's a terrific question, and I love how you've asked it of all your guests. Curious to see how mine fits into that penalty of respond.

Kaihan Krippendorff: A lot of commonality, but never an agreement. Never agreement. So whatever he says

Devin DeCiantis: That's good. That's reassuring. Exactly. There's no right answer. I actually like to think of strategy as a form of proactive planning and decision making in service of an enduring mission.

And that definition evokes some of the original Greek characterization of the general, the original strategy. You know, somebody responsible for managing matters both of competition and commerce. So practically speaking for modern leaders, this involves, first, defining a clear and compelling North Star to orient the collective action for years to come. But then it involves staring out into an unknowable future and assigning a range of possibilities to various potential outcomes and then ultimately taking decisions that will hopefully maximize the probability of achieving your desired future state. For many of our clients, you know, during enterprises that we profile in the book, that goal is clearly multigenerational success.

And one thing that makes that definition unique, at least in my experience, is that it naturally stretches out our strategic planning horizon across years and, in fact, even decades. So that requires the consideration of some more systemic challenges and opportunities. And maybe other leaders and organizations might otherwise ignore one of the most obvious being the longer term impacts. For instance, it's climate change.

Kaihan Krippendorff: Yeah. That's great. I love I love it. Yeah. And I love that about your work that you kind of look at the firm not in isolation at the whim of the external environment, but as interacting within the system, the political, economic, social system.

And I guess that becomes important when you have a long term perspective, which is what families are kind of by nature, what they bring Exactly. To it. So let's dig into this

Speaker 0: a little bit. There's a lot that there's a lot for us

Kaihan Krippendorff: to cover. I just wanna just open up with just some historical context. Can you just give some historical context of the family owned enterprise. Like, how old are they? How do how long do they how old are they compared to, say, the corporation or kingdoms or, you know, how long they've been around?

Devin DeCiantis: Absolutely. Well, I mean, as with all forms of private enterprise. They evolved in their modern in alignment with the evolution of the first frontier economies in the wake of the economic development that have proceeded out of the renaissance and as feudal economies in Western Europe, in particular, began to evolve into these early commercial domains where embryonic businesses, merchants, and traders began to swap goods and services in in small medieval villages and at country fairs, you know, these private enterprises and domestic families began to accumulate wisdom and the capital that would allow for them to translate in apprentice folks for generations and Some of the oldest companies in the world are, you know, winemakers and breweries and hotels and ins and so forth that emerged around that time. And so as an organizational form, there there's quite a long history the enduring enterprises that we study, the oldest in the book that we capture is actually a Japanese temple builder. It was established

Kaihan Krippendorff: in the first place. Japanese.

Devin DeCiantis: Yeah. Congogumi Mhmm. That had been around for over fourteen hundred years. And you would think that success, you know, having survived all sorts of regime change and war and economic evolution and so forth over those years in addition to all the challenges that come with just managing one's family continuously and then a coherent and harmonious way over time that you would think that it would have continued, but it was actually the global financial crisis that brought Bongo Gumi to its knees as the temple builder in in its fortieth generation of family stewardship. Eventually made missteps took on a little too much debt, began to diversify away from its more traditional artisanal heritage and was unceremoniously acquired by one of its competitors.

So it is in in some ways both an incredible tale of entrepreneurial endurance and a cautionary tale just because an organization has been successful for that amount of time doesn't necessarily guarantee its continued success in the future.

Kaihan Krippendorff: That's great. That's great. The lessons that we can learn from that longevity, you know, also applies to the organizational lesson came from. But before I wanna get into why you decided to start studying family business. Before we do that, I'd love to just shape the perceptions maybe of some listeners of the family business.

Wow. Maybe they actually do are very old. Got that. But, you know, aren't they sort of you know, if you think of smaller mom and pop local businesses, maybe can give us a little couple examples of companies that might it'll give us examples of companies that don't fit that model of being a small family to see.

Devin DeCiantis: Absolutely. And then the first thing that maybe it's evoked in most people's minds as they think about family enterprises are the mom and pop shops that litter the, you know, the retail landscape in our local communities that drive cleaners, the restaurants, the convenience stores, and so forth. And it is absolutely true that the long tail of entrepreneurial activity is densely populated. With family businesses, but they also represent some of the largest and most systemically important businesses in in most major economies around the world and can represent up to 90% of all economic activity, employment, research, and development, and so forth. In in in most of the world's economies in The United States where many of listeners are based, you know, families like the Walgreens control Walmart, obviously, and the ox sold the Burger King.

They control the New York Times and the Cargills and the Mars family. Mean, these are some of the commanding heights of the American economy both in terms of retail, in terms of manufacturing agriculture, mining and industry oil and gas, you know, information and telecommunications and so forth. Are controlled by the same families that had originally founded those businesses and have done so in a past stewardship of those organizations across generations successfully. And so part of what we were hoping with this book is to demystify the sense that when we talk about family business, we're really talking about SMEs. And in fact, we are talking about some of the largest and most enduring organizations on the planet.

Kaihan Krippendorff: So what motivated. You started touching this now to start studying family businesses and especially in that emerging and frontier economies and how why did you think studying family businesses could give us insights into managing and more stable in advancing.

Devin DeCiantis: For the last fifteen years or so, I've been studying and advising and teaching about family business continuity around the world. I've been fascinated by the topic actually ever since I met my dear friend and coauthor Yvonne Lansberg nearly twenty years ago. And he was the one who first introduced me to this this new species of private enterprise that nobody ever taught me about in business school or in policy school, but is, in fact, the dominant organizational form as we just mentioned. And as I began to learn more, I was instantly inspired by their longer planning horizons, their deep commitment to their stakeholders and their communities, their strong emphasis on family values and organizational culture, and as a former investment banker, I was also really impressed by how they tend to outperform non family businesses over the longer run. Look at any number of indices of family business performance, at least among those publicly traded and then studies a privately traded family control company.

And they do tend to outperform considerably. They're publicly traded, non family controlled peers. Additionally, you can look at some of the research and just, you know, search for, you know, oldest companies in the world or take a look at any of the Jim Collins and, Boris, the study is good to great build to last and so forth. And you will see that family control companies are disproportionately represented in the upcases of those books. And it's for a litany of reasons, many of which I just mentioned here, that they do tend to build themselves.

Their orientation is naturally built towards success in the longer term. So they aren't immediately drawn or seduced by chasing efficiency in profits. Their orientation is not quarterly, but in fact, quarter century. And that's and that's something that I found working within these organizations and advising their leadership teams is truly a unique differentiator and one that is quite compelling for many of the folks who interact with them in variety of ways.

Kaihan Krippendorff: And you also have this kind of distinction. I'm not gonna get the wording exactly right. But, you know, there are stable, advanced economies, let's say, you know, and then there are the whatever, the frontier, the emerging that where there's less ability. You know, we look you have a graph interesting graph of the Argentine inflation rate over time, and it's very steep. You know?

What do you have evidence to show that the family owned businesses are particularly adept as compared to non family owned businesses in those more volatile environments?

Devin DeCiantis: Yeah. The two sets of data. One is just a prevalence in those environments. The fact that, especially, the further down that hierarchy of stability as we flag in the in the book emerging in frontier economies, the preponderance of family control companies increases. Their proportion of all economic activity grows up to 90%.

Whereas in more advanced economies, it tends to be lower and there are a variety of reasons that help to explain that. But it's also that, you know, you pointed your finger at an important structural difference between an advanced economy and an emerging or frontier economy. And it's a recognition we need to recognize that all stability comes at a price. You know, whether it's funded publicly by the state or secured privately by families and companies. And so in advanced economies where most of the time, you know, we can trust that when we flick a switch light will turn on when we open up faucet clean water will flow that we can easily drink, you know, when we tap on our phones and Uber will shuttle us safely to dinner or bring our groceries to us.

You know, that that level of stability and predictability allows private enterprise and private households to more or less plan for their own self interest. They don't need to worry about infrastructures that enable all of that activity to proliferate. But further down the developmental ladder, there are many gaps in the institutions and infrastructures that support that kind of stability. And so, enterprising families have to take it upon themselves to invest in that stability internally. And that was the premise for our recognition of and our discovery.

Let's just say, of these themes, these strategic coping strategies that we found families around the world who operate in emerging and frontier economies, these turbulent environments would consistently deploy, and we found this portfolio strategies recurring across geography and across industry and even across time, and it's one of the reason why we distilled them down into these seven, and we tried to highlight as many cases and examples from the round around the world as we could so that we could inspire others to consider maybe adopting or deploying them in the face of turbulence whenever it emerges, even if they happen to be located in an advanced economy and sitting in an office in New York, London.

Kaihan Krippendorff: Yeah. And I think that advanced economies are only gonna be experiencing more unexpected volatility. So we can all learn from them. Let's just briefly go through these seven. We won't go through each one by one.

Just if you don't mind just, like, and a listing and describing each one so that our listeners can get the full picture.

Devin DeCiantis: Absolutely. So there are there's seven of them. In fact, there were more as we were originally going through our research, but these were the seven that we found to be most recurring and most replicable. And I wish there was an acronym that would help you to memorize them better. But we've got plenty of content involved.

We list them, and then we can maybe dive into one or two and would welcome anybody to reach out if they wanna talk through any in greater detail. But The first is differentiation, which is essentially, you know, supplying an underserved niche in conditions that are, you know, otherwise hostile to traditional competition. We've got modularity, which is about developing a network of partnerships that can operate autonomously and share resources seamlessly. We've got redundancy, which is about investing in backup resources and processes for all essential systems and activities. That symbiosis, which is about coordinating actions and sharing resources across nested or independent systems of power and influence.

We have migration, which is about moving into new markets as resources become scarce and conditions more hostile. We got simplification, which is about reducing complexity, to cope with chronic resource scarcity or societal instability. And finally, we've got diversity, which is about developing a broader rate of capabilities and resources to minimize the risk of systemic collapse. And each of these seven, we dedicate an entire chapter two. We start that chapter with an iconic case, but then we dive into a bunch of ways in which leaders and organizations around the world can and have deployed them effectively to build stability internally in the face of external instability.

Kaihan Krippendorff: So we got differentiation modularity redundancy, symbiosis, migration, simplification, diversity. We'd love to go through all the highly recommend people buy the book and dig into each one let's with the time that we have, let's dig into differentiation modularity and redundancy. Just give you an example of differentiation and, you know, it kinda illustrates its importance.

Devin DeCiantis: Differentiation was a stabilizing strategy. We observed countless companies deploying to achieve enduring success. And, really, it involves focusing on underserved niche markets, particularly in those volatile environments where resources and competition scarce. And therefore, there are natural barriers to entry that chase away all but the post interpretative entrepreneurs. And the case that we feature in the chapter on differentiation is the AE group in Peru.

Who we like to think of as the poster child for how to effectively deploy this stabilizing strategy And they're a company that was born during a terrorist uprising, if you can imagine that, a time during which the global beverage giants like Coke and Pepsi had stopped servicing rural communities. And the Ingenio's family decided to launch their own local alternative she called. Polar Royale using recycled beer bottles from their neighbors and their own homemade filing equipment. And leveraging this ingenuity and this resourcefulness, they were actually able to survive and eventually even thrive in the face of this existential threat. And their experience not only shaped the company's unique approach to manufacturing and distribution, but over time, it helped them to become one of the largest beverage manufacturers and distributors in the world.

I believe they're top 10 distributor by volume currently. And we found many similar examples of this form of frugal innovation, as we call it, around the world, from South Asia to Africa to the Far East. They are a phenomenon. In South Asia, for instance, the terminology of Jigad or frugal in innovation is one that has dominated the entrepreneurial landscape in that country. In in Swahili, the term, Waukali, talks about the informal network of entrepreneurs who will go and fix basically anything that needs fixing in the local economy.

This sort of idea that necessity is the mother of invention, and there are these wonderful, intrepid entrepreneurs who are out there solving and resolving so many of the unmet needs that are prevalent in these more turbulent environments. We found to be a source of incredible inspiration. And the fact that it isn't just something that happens at the, again, at the SME level, but that when deployed effectively and scaled effectively, you can actually build a large, globally competitive multinational business leveraging the stabilizing strategy.

Kaihan Krippendorff: I'm gonna answer my question, and I'm probably not answering it correctly. But just to show you that, at least, I'm thinking about it, is why might we see that strategy be more prevalent in a family owned organization versus non family owned. And what I'm thinking is a family owned organization might be committed to the family, the country, the community. So just pulling out, just, you know, doing the war and buffet and just selling it is not the option. Instead, we have to lean in, figure out how to make it work.

Is that at all part of the answer? Or what else am

Devin DeCiantis: I Absolutely. And I appreciate you bringing that up. The idea that families themselves can provide a unique source of stability is something that we highlight throughout the block. And it's precisely because when they work well, families represent an inherent and an instinctive source of trust. I mean, that trust is hardwired into our ancient brains that I that idea of reciprocal altruism that ties us and binds us to our closest blood relatives and allows for us to presume trust until, of course, that trust is betrayed, but we presume trust of those that we know much more so than we do for strangers.

And, again, that's one of the biggest differentiators between an advanced and a frontier economy is the degree to which we trust those who we do not yet know both in social and in commercial affairs. But the families themselves are also inclined to focus on, again, longer term performance because they're multigenerational in their orientation. They have an amazing capacity to build institutional memory and transfer that knowledge and that resilience across generations. They share the wisdom on how they successfully navigated through crises with each rising generation. You know, they sit down on grandpa's knee and learn about the time in which there's a wonderful story from one of our client families in Latin America.

The father who was caught in Mexico on a vacation during a tropical storm with his small children. And heroically, he tied them you know, they tied themselves to a tree overnight to ride out the hurricane that was barreling through, and they survived until the morning in two generations later. The family is still retelling that story and continues to draw lessons in that in in moments of adversity about how they've overcome some really terrific challenges in the past and how their family is able to cope in in with agility and perseverance able to achieve lasting success.

Kaihan Krippendorff: I love that. Yeah. So this is metaphor of throwing your hat over the wall. It's like you're committed. You're gonna figure out how to get over that wall because of the commitment.

I love that. So we could talk more about that. But let's talk about modularity, developing a network of partnerships that operate autonomously and share resources seamlessly. Maybe just describe that to us and explain why family business are particularly well suited to this product.

Devin DeCiantis: Absolutely. So we studied many successful multigenerational businesses around the world and found that modularity was, in fact, a core driver of growth and stability among many of them, particularly once again in uncertain environments. And it turns out that the enduring enterprises who deploy this strategy are inherently more complex because of all these modular parts that need to fit together. But when these interdependent and independent parts are working together seamlessly, in service of a common mission, the modularity can actually provide a powerful and lasting competitive advantage to think of, for instance, a business like IKEA, also a family controlled company that that has leveraged modularity throughout their operation. So they do this in business in terms of their product design, their store layouts, their flat pack logistics, and they're able to offer, you know, affordable self assembled furniture on a global scale.

You can consider non family example of Tesla and their gigafactories. Where they build modularity directly into their manufacturing process so they can start and scale their building and just bolt on growth over time. All the parts are designed to be interoperable. And if one goes down, you can either leverage of the others or you can build in a new one and continuously scale over time. We also talk about in the chapter on modularity the idea that this strategy can be deployed not just in business and operations, but also in ownership.

And various forms of franchise and joint venture have enabled companies like McDonald's and Caterpillar and Xerox over the years to partner with enterprising families in emerging frontier economies as they expand into new markets with much greater confidence in that they're local partners, these families who have boots on the ground are able to tropicalize these western businesses and western products for local markets. And that approach was really pioneered by Ray Crock in the nineteen fifties who mastered the model first domestically and then took it internationally, but it was quickly copied by many other brands. And in families, these enduring networks of trusted relationships can actually become among their most enduring assets. So if you think about, you know, how these relationships need to be managed across time, you know, managers at McDonald's will come and go over the years, but the family will remain. And so making sure that those relationships are being effectively managed and stewarded and handed off from generation to generation within the family and that you're constantly connecting to the leadership teams of these Western multinationals is a critical skill that needs to be developed.

And it's a critical source of insight, intelligence, capital, innovation that might not otherwise be accessible to families who are operating in some complicated environments. So in in some ways, they are able to leverage of all of the r and d and investment and organizational sophistication of their Western partners plugging them into this sort of modular network, this portfolio of franchise relationships that they manage domestically within their economies, but bringing the best of the world to their local consumers.

Kaihan Krippendorff: So, you know, when I read through that, I was thinking about maybe two months ago, I was in India doing some workshops. A lot of the companies doing workshops for family businesses, you know, and you had, like, a jewelry company. Right? They've got the import company. They've got the synthetic diamond company.

They've got the diamond processing company. They've got the jewel design company. They've got the export company. They've got the import company. And each of those are run by a different family member, a cousin, or something like that.

So, I mean, we were together with all of them together. I kinda felt like, you know, they're running their own businesses, but there is this not underlying, this overlying commitment or something kind of connections for that, like, hey. It's not so much. Hey. The profit that I'm making is coming out of you and the profit you're making coming out of me.

So, like, something a little about, like, what is it about the family enterprise that allows modularity to work or leads them naturally to modularity. Maybe that's the direction. Maybe I'm you know, but maybe your other No.

Devin DeCiantis: It's a terrific observation. And we see this not only within families where, you know, many times you'll have each of a number of siblings or cousins managing different operating companies depending on their geography or the unique skill set of the family member. In the interest of the family member, and maybe some of the some of these operating divisions are in service of the skills and the interests of those individuals. But in addition to that, this idea of a familial network and modularity in family goes beyond just one's own family, and we found this invention of familial networks to be pervasive around the world. So for instance, in in China, this construct is called Pangshi.

And it's essentially that describes the relationship of reciprocal benefit between two unrelated families that can continue across generations. And it typically starts from a position of trust and sort of friendship and mutual support, but then it can engage in in a form of commercial relationship that then transcends generations. And so the original partners to some form of collaborative activity hand off their partnership to their children and eventually to their grandchildren in these extended networks of families that provide access to ideas, information, capital, and labor that allow families to project their influence much further than maybe their own sort of in house human capital might otherwise allow them to. And in Arab cultures, there's a similar construct that's sometimes called Wasta. In Russia, the phenomenon is called black and so forth.

In in various countries, there's a similar construct where it isn't just within our family that we're able to project in trust that our siblings and cousins will be able to manage disparate parts of a business with trust and independence, but we can project and extend that trust to friends and family network that that lives just beyond our blood relatives or our household that also then projects our influence and capacity to grow.

Kaihan Krippendorff: And is there a mechanism for a non family organization to replicate such a level of Yeah. Of It's

Devin DeCiantis: a great it's a great question. I think the biggest difference between the way in which if a family would approach building that kind of partnership and a non family entity would consider it is the commitment to it being relational as opposed to transactional. You know, families are innately relational in the way in which they try to build and invest in these kinds of interactions. They recognize that this isn't just a one off, that this is an iterative game and that, you know, cheating you or know, trying to get the most out of this particular transaction is not doing either of us any favors if we're trying to build something that that we hope to continue for twenty or thirty years. So if we can escape from this more transactional mindset and shift into a relational mindset, we are invoking our inner family.

And projecting a familial network of our own out into these relationships that that many families around the world use effectively to help build stability.

Kaihan Krippendorff: Yeah. That makes sense. That makes sense. Like, the interdependence lasts longer than this transaction. I was thinking also probably there's some sense of identity as well.

Some organizations are good at developing even, like, alumni of some organizations. They're like, oh, you work that, you know, wherever and some

Devin DeCiantis: So Absolutely. In investment banks and management consultancies are quite good at that. They want to believe at least as long as they leave on good terms and they go in industry, then you've got yourself a natural toehold into the organization. And the trust is built in that directly to that relationship that might make the barrier to transact a little bit lower and therefore help you to out compete for whatever.

Kaihan Krippendorff: Yeah. Probably cop some common language as well and warms and things. Okay. Anyway, we're reaching the top of our time with you. I think we should also just touch on redundancy coordinating actions and sharing resources across nested and interdependent systems.

You know, it makes sense that, you know, to survive and preferably thrive on in under uncertainty, you need redundancy versus in a stable environment, you know, you want efficiency, you talk about just in time versus just in case, I think that's what you're covering here. Could you just talk a little bit about what redundancy is and why it's important and why family owned companies particularly

Devin DeCiantis: attuned absolutely. Again, when you're managing for the downside to protect against the worst possible thing happening as opposed to chasing the up side, then investments in redundancy don't feel wasteful. In fact, they're an essential form of insurance. And one of the inspiring cases that that really that helped to crystallize this idea for us was it'll Plaza Hotel in Port Au Prince Haiti, you know, and the Pier Louise family that has faced basically every form of calamity over the decades operating in one of the world's most notorious failed states, you know, and we asked them how they've done it. And they said precisely by investing proactively in stability.

And in this case, using strategic redundancy wherever they possibly could. So they deployed countless backup systems for power, for communications, for supplies, and even for their security. You know, their external security. They have even backup systems for their backup systems and backup parts for each of those systems because none of those infrastructures on their own can ever fully be trusted in we then took a look at, in fact, militaries where decision making is often a life and death exercise, and they tend to take a similar approach. Again, given that human lives are at stake whenever their critical systems fail, and in the military, this approach of redundancy is often called the belt and suspenders approach.

Because you want at least two systems to help make sure you don't get caught with your pants down or as the old saying goes, two is one, and one is none. And is one of the reasons why the cost of military budgets has spiraled and is so large, but it's because these systems are so essential that you need to make sure that you've got redundant supplies available for key goods, for key materials, for key personnel, and so forth. When supply chain's snarl in the middle of a battle, it's life and death. It's not just that, you know, folks aren't gonna get their gifts in time for the holiday.

Kaihan Krippendorff: Right. Or if you have to pay a little more money. Right? That's amazing. Yeah.

So I'd love to dig in further. That you know, that's the time that we have with you. So, you know, people can absolutely buy the book. Maybe they can catch you at Harvard. Maybe they can catch you at Kellogg.

They can certainly contact you through your through LGA, your consulting firm. How do you suggest people that want to learn more and connect with you? How do they

Devin DeCiantis: Please reach out to us at LGA. You can reach us via email. I am a conscientious objector when it comes to most social media, but do have an account on LinkedIn, so feel free to reach out that way as well. And really appreciate hearing whether or not these ideas resonate and if you're able to deploy them so that we can share these lessons with others.

Kaihan Krippendorff: Well, Devon, thank you. I know it's been two decades of work and experience and study and insulating it so succinctly, elegantly introduced into this book. Thank you for doing that, and thank you for taking the time to share some of that

Devin DeCiantis: with us. Thank you so much for inviting me.