Middle Eastern family businesses are fascinating. The region is full of examples of first generation entrepreneurs that come from humble beginnings and have created mega business empires through inventiveness, speed and uncanny business acumen.  Knowing that many have achieved these feats in the absence of even the most basic financial, organizational and technological tools makes their meteoric rise even more astounding. Today, brands such as Al-Futtaim, Alshaya and Al Naboodah are beacons of progress, drivers of local and regional economies, and increasingly important players on the global stage.

In recent years, there has been a gradual transfer of power from the first generation founding entrepreneurs to their second generation, well-educated, cosmopolitan and market savvy sons and daughters. More often than not, they are are energetic, well-travelled, digitally-savvy, connected executives with ambitions to not only carry on the family business, but to see it reach even greater heights and profile.

This succession of leadership in the context of the transformative mobile, social and intimate market dynamics are setting the stage for a seismic shift in how businesses operate.  As the family/organization seek to strike a balance between preserving traditions with the real need to implement radical strategies attuned to the changes in consumer/brand/communication behavior,  both generations will be navigating through uncharted territories.

How these pioneering brands emerge from these debates can very well determine the future viability and success of the business. This will be an area we will be keeping a keen eye on in the coming months and years.

- William Shintani is a partner at MBLM and an innovation spotter at the intersection of brand, business & technology.

Photo: George Lange/ Contour by Getty Images

Reading Steve Jobs’ biography makes you think about the recipe for success. Financial success, of course, but more than that, one wonders about what makes products so successful that they are literally loved by millions of people, consistently over decades. Jobs hints at the user experience advantage provided by closed systems and I feel that he is right. Of course, in a world where the good people are pushing for Open Source, many would disagree that taking away options could contribute to a better user experience.

But naysayers, look around: hardly any system that relies on software is open. Let’s take a journey through your typical day and see where software forms user experience. When your alarm clock goes off, it is triggered by software; your coffee maker starts to brew thanks to an embedded system on a chip. You switch on the TV, and both the cable box and the TV run on proprietary programs you can’t change. You enter your car to get to work and for 20 minutes or so, you actually sit in the most expensive computer you own. Neither the dashboard nor the CD player, not even the GPS, can be influenced in any way other than the degree prescribed by the people in Detroit, Tokyo or Ingolstadt. There is really no open system other than your personal computer at home. That’s the only place where you might be able to change the operating system or hack and modify what you can. Other than that and your smart phone (if you’re really into hacking), there is rarely an open system in this world that matters.

So why would you want that? Freedom of choice, yes, philosophically I get it. But really, that freedom rarely improves user experience. I have a netbook which I occasionally boot into JollyCloud, an Open Source operating system. I had a jailbroken iPhone 1 for the longest time. Other than a few minutes of fun exploring new things, the user experience is rather bad (for example, the jailbreak kept me from updating the phone and thus I had to live with outdated software most of the time).

Semi-open systems are the worst. Ever tried a new Windows on old hardware? Or Android being modified for you by Verizon? I can’t see where this is good for the user. For now I’ll stick with the new evil, the demons from Cupertino. Sure, I can’t have Linux on my MacBook nor Android on my iPhone. No freedom, no openness. But also no blue screen, no slowness, no battery drainage and no bloat ware. Just the user experience I want.

- Olaf Kreitz is a partner at MBLM. When it comes to technology, he always seems to have an opinion.

On September 4, 1888 George Eastman registered the name Kodak, which he jointly developed with his mother. Later that year the first Kodak camera emerged on the market. The pictures it took were a scant 2 ½ inches in diameter, but as they say the rest is history. What the Kodak brand stood for over time was so powerful and globally ubiquitous that it became synonymous with American ingenuity and the popularization of complex technology for the common man. There were times when you could travel to the farthest reaches of the globe and easily spot the yellow and red Kodak film boxes at remote bodegas as well as the finest emporiums. It was most likely alongside a sign for Coca-Cola, the other principal American export to the world for most of the 20th Century.

In 1889, Eastman once again proved he was a great marketer as well as an industrialist when he came up with the legendary advertising slogan, “You push the button and we’ll do the rest,” which arguably deserves to be in the top ten of historical all time positioning lines – along with “Don’t leave home without it” for American Express, “You deserve a break today” for McDonalds and “We bring good things to life” for General Electric.

Now, it is with great sadness that Antonio Perez, Kodak CEO for the last 6 years, is presiding over what appears to be a fire sale of intellectual property assets, many of them in digital photography that others (not Kodak) have exploited for market share and profits. It is little known, but many of Kodak’s patents make digital photography possible, yet in a classic case of “milking the cash cow,” Kodak refused to accept the onset of digital photography and the disruptive effect it would have on the 70-80% operating margins they once enjoyed on the film (silver halite) business.  In the mid 1990’s, several of us recommended to Kodak that they adopt a new sub-brand, which we created called Kodak DS – Digital Science. The idea was that Kodak should take credit for the vast array of patents the company had across many digital platforms and applications including health imaging, commercial printing and of course digital photography. I always wonder to this day if things would be different if they had invested heavily behind this digital (future oriented) strategy – way back in 1993! Instead they sequestered the digital science brand logo and put it on a couple of low-end digital cameras and after a few years it disappeared mainly because no one was left who participated in the original strategy that was designed to position the company for the future.

As for the future, Eastman Kodak (NYSE:EK)  filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy protection in the Southern District Court of New York, on January 19, 2012 – and will apparently emerge with a focus on inkjet printers. They have buttons, don’t they?

- Bob Kahn heads up the Aviation & Travel practice at MBLM and previously has been a brand strategy leader at Futurebrand, Landor, Brand Union and Ogilvy & Mather.

Devices and services are coming together at a fast clip, changing the way people get everyday things done. We can now stream any type of content from our tablet, use our phones to pay at checkout, turn appliances on and off remotely and even let the utility company decide when to turn on the air conditioner. When you think about it, the smarting of products is changing the most mundane of chores–and with that– established notions of what brands stand for:. Your phone now does what your credit card did, your tablet replaces your DVR, your laptop is a universal remote control and utilities double as financial advisors.

Because these ventures upend deep-rooted notions and often overlap, driving adoption calls for a new narrative in which brands play a key role. Explaining that a certain mobile wallet only works on NFC equipped phones sold by certain carriers and is only accepted at certain terminals, gets a lot easier if you add four brands: “Use Google Wallet for the Sprint LTE Galaxy Nexus, wherever you see a Mastercard Paypass mark.”

We’ll surely see more and more disparate comingling of brands in the coming months. In purpose, they may be just shortcuts for making new and complex products more intuitive and easier to adopt. But recent experience also suggests that these associations will come with an important competitive edge. By becoming integrated into users’ everyday language, these ‘avatars’ will move closer to customers, and deeper into their minds and hearts, resulting in a larger chasm separating the ones leading the smarting of products and services from those that remain isolated.

- Diego Kolsky is a partner at MBLM who uses brand as an excuse to write for this blog.

I consider myself to be a fairly environmentally conscious person. I live in New York and don’t have a car, so that’s a common vice that’s easy for me to do without. I’m the guy the girl in the deli recognizes as “no bag” for my morning bagel. I routinely transport groceries home in a bag I brought with me. Admittedly, it’s my wife who schlepps the empty cans back to the supermarket, but if she forgets to do so then I can rest assured that the can-collector will come around with his shopping cart and pull them out of the bin. In New York there are microeconomies subsisting on deposit currency, so I know those cans and bottles are not going into the waste stream.

However, there are a lot of small decisions to make throughout the day of which I’m unsure which one is truly more sustainable. Can or bottle, paper or plastic? Instinctively I balk at plastic bags and prefer paper. A petroleum based product must be worse than one that can be produced from recycled material or a replenishable resource. Trees grow back after all, don’t they?

It makes me squeamish when I have to eat in a corporate cafeteria and the food is served on styrofoam cups and plates. The cafeteria at my university in Germany used plastic plates but those were collected and washed to be reused hundreds if not thousands of times. That’s greener. Am I right?

What I don’t know is whether any of my gut instincts about these things are correct. I’ve read the New Yorker article that pointed out that as long as you live east of Ohio, Vouvray shipped in from France uses less energy than Chardonnay trucked in from Napa. Or was it produces less carbon? I’d really like to know the answers to my hunches, so consider this the first post of many on my journey to get smart about green. I plan to scour the internet, read the classics, interview experts and poll my peers to find out.

- Sidney Blank is a partner at MBLM writing on all things digital and whatever else strikes his fancy. This week he grappled with his inner green giant.