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Case Study

Firmenich: Juggling the short and the long term (Cartoon case)

By Sameh Abadir and Marta Widz

18 pages

July 2022

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Reference: IMD-7-2308

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.

Learning Objective

The case aims to illustrate how family businesses tend to have core foundational beliefs that support strong, long-standing sustainability commitments.

Keywords

Family Business, Sustainability, Strategy, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Succession, Governance, Resilience, Environmental Social and Governance, Value, Long Term Planning, Inclusive Capitalism, Impact, COVID-19, Crisis

Settings

World/global
Firmenich, Consumer Goods, Cosmetics and Perfumes, Consumer Goods, Food and Beverage
2020

Type

Field Research

Available Languages

English

Related material

Teaching note, Video

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