Anticipating intergenerational management transfer of family firms: A typology of next generation’s future leadership projections

•14 next-generation participants were enrolled in a three-day program to think about the management role transition they will face within the next 20 years.•We identified the main aspects of the next generation members’ cognitive and emotional experience when thinking about their future leadership role.•We built a typology of four future projections of leadership role in France 2035: the Protector, the Reformer, the Opportunist, and the Rebel.•We discuss the opportunities emerging from these projected futures and the strategic choices that French family firms will have to make in the next twenty years. A key assumption in family business research and practice is that for family businesses to have a future, succession must be secured. Because family businesses are hybrid organizations with partially or totally overlapping family and business identities, a second consensual assumption is shared by most family business scholars and entrepreneurs: the business needs to stay in the family, so intra-family succession is the optimal ownership and management transfer solution. Yet both assumptions adopt the perspective of the business founder or the current family business leader. Next generations are rarely asked to express their thoughts and feelings about the future of the family firms that they are expected to protect, develop and pass on to their own children. Do next generation members share these two assumptions or do they envision their potential leadership role differently, expressing alternative views about the meaning and scope of family business succession? In this article, we present and discuss four alternative future leadership projections generated by a group of 14 next generation members participating in a training workshop held in the west of France in August 2013.