Susanne Stein, managing partner of Vienna’s MANZ Publishers, explains how she harnessed Artificial Intelligence to transform the company from a traditional publishing house to a cutting-edge online legal publisher.
One of the advantages of being a family business is that you can take a five-year horizon on decisions and not worry about quarterly reporting – but it is also necessary to be aware of the tensions created by the decisions you make. Within a family business, you always end up asking yourself, “What would my grandfather do?” On the one hand, you need to hold on to some of the tradition and some of the history, but at the same time, every generation must find its own path.
A case in point was the decision to sell our printing company in 2001. As the fifth-generation owner of a publishing house, it was hard for us to stop printing books. But it was clear that what printing was in the 20th century, artificial intelligence and software engineering are going to…