Shift podcast: Helping you rethink business transformation
Legacy & The Next 40 Years — A Generational Handoff in Canadian City-Building
What survives when you hand a company to the next generation—and the world has changed underneath you? Mitchell Cohen has run the Daniels Corporation since 1984, building a development company on a conviction that traces back to his roots in Montreal's 1970s housing co-op movement: that housing is a right, not just a product. This September, his son Jacob stepped into the president's chair—by his own account, "in the toughest market our industry's ever seen." In only their second-ever joint interview, Mitchell and Jacob sit down with PwC's Shift for a candid conversation about what it actually takes to pass the torch without losing the soul of a company. They get into why brand isn't a logo but a promise ("we do what we say we're going to do"), what it means to build in a "trust recession," and the chance sidewalk encounter that turned into a quilt called a love poem to an entire community. Along the way they make a surprisingly persuasive case that empathy belongs on the balance sheet—and that the way out of Canada's affordability crisis comes down to a single word: collaboration. If you take one idea away, it's this: you don't have to choose between doing well and doing good—and the next chapter of our cities depends on more people believing it.
