This case presents the history and recent governing challenges of Carvajal, S.A., a Colombia-based, family-owned, billion-dollar-plus holding company that had offered print-connected (e.g., Yellow Pages, laptops) and other products and services across and beyond South America for at least a century. Particularly, the case details the company’s state of affairs in early 2011, a time by which Carvajal's flagship companies decreased demand for paper and had grown rapidly with the development of digital technology /print-established products. Though gains and growth stayed positive, Carvajal's leaders understood that carrying on the heritage of returns, dividends for all family members, and extensive philanthropy of the business would require significant strategy and execution. Compounding the strategy problems, these marketplace challenges were confronted by Carvajal with new leadership: the first non-family CEO since the organization’s origin. Well-established Colombian executive Ricardo Obregon was hired in 2008 over two family nominees to lead the company. Obregon was to monitor a complicated governance network that included a holding company with seven operating companies, their direction and individual boards, a family council, and 280 members (including partners) of a shareholding family in its sixth generation.
Carvajal's business and family leaders needed to confront marketplace problems and conclusions that contained the possibility of choosing people the managing companies or the holding company while maintaining the long conventions of powerful ethics, esteem, unity, and philanthropy of the business. That meant optimizing several critical relationships: between the family and the new CEO; between the family and also the board; between the managing companies and the holding company; and between members of the large Carvajal family, many of whom now lived outside of Colombia and Latin America.
PUBLICATION DATE: December 30, 2014 PRODUCT #: KEL872-PDF-ENG
This is just an excerpt. This case is about LEADERSHIP & MANAGING PEOPLE
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