If your dream is to see your children carry on the family business, you must both look at every day with that intention, and enjoy it as a process. And, as Seth Godin writes in a recent blog: “…the end result is always at the end of an arc, always the result of many steps, of earning trust, of building a connection.” http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2016/10/now-is-never.html
To all families there comes the time of letting the children go. Sooner or later, they leave home and move out into the world.
But for parents, truly letting children go is often much more complex than that. It requires the emotional cutting of ties with expectations; hopes; dreams—about what our children should do with their lives; who we think our children are; our views of their abilities; personality; gifts; ambitions.
For business families especially, expectations confront realities with regard to the roles the children could, should, will, will not play in the family business. How are the children disappointing, perplexing, annoying?
By tying themselves to agendas for their children’s future, parents impinge on their own inner peace. It’s really hard to see and be truthful about these inner agendas, and harder still to let them go—but this way lies freedom.
The children are set free to follow their own paths—to continue in our footsteps; to surpass us, to do less, to succeed, or fail. And parents are set free as well, to explore the challenges and rewards their own future holds.
When struggling with a theme for this blog, I often seek inspiration from Seth Godin, well-known author, entrepreneur and marketer. In a recent blog entitled The ripples, Godin opens with: “Every decision we make changes things.” http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2016/09/the-ripples.html
It follows therefore that every business decision we make changes the business. It can be large–move the business from Brooklyn to Florida–or it can be small–meet a casual contact for coffee at Starbucks. The apparent size of the decision does not foretell the size of the consequences.
Some decisions are made for the short-term, some for the long-term. But decisions are instruments of movement… and what is seen initially as a short-term decision can start a series of dynamic changes that continue far into the future.
At the end of the same article, Godin asks: “How did you get to where you are? Who is going to go even further because of you?”
It may be useful in the conduct of our day to day business to keep this in mind. What decision that you made today, however small and ordinary, may bring your business and your family further than you can imagine? For generations.
Some of the world’s oldest businesses are family businesses, and women have perennially played significant roles in them. From generation to generation women have served in one or more of these high-level capacities:
Today women have become visible as prominent business leaders worldwide.
At the 4th Annual Global Family Business Event, coming up on September 29th, the keynote speaker will be Harshbeena Zaveri, leader of the engineering firm NRB Bearings and one of India’s most powerful business women.
*Previous speakers at this event have included:
Lena Jungell, granddaughter of Fazer Group founder Karl Jungell. Starting in 1891 as a small cafe in Helsinki, the Fazer family now owns an international bakery and confectionary company.
Ana Urea, one of the owners of The Privax Group, a conglomerate of predominantly fashion-related family businesses, now involving its second and third generations. The Privax Group is the current industry leader throughout Canada and Latin America.
Raya Strauss Ben-Dror, and her daughter, Nava Michael-Tsabari of The Strauss Group. Starting in 1938 with two cows, the company sold dairy products. The Straus Group is now a multinational family business and Israel’s largest food and beverage company.
*See past events at http://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/fieldcenter/global-family-business-event-3/
The NY Times’ Corner Office, by Adam Bryant is one of my favorite business columns. In it he reports on his interviews with business leaders. On Sunday, September 2, he turned his spotlight on Ben Chestnut, CEO of MailChimp.
When Bryant asked him to name some of his leadership lessons, Chestnut’s answered: “Never sacrifice momentum. I might know a better path, but if we’ve got a lot of momentum, if everyone’s united and they’re marching together and the path is O.K., just go with the flow. I may eventually nudge them down a new path, but never stop the troops midmarch.”
This lesson came to mind while I was working with a client who was trying to decide on one of several possible paths. The choice became obvious upon considering where there was the greatest momentum, and thereby the possibility of a quicker return.
Recognizing a path with momentum can be tricky, but it can make all the difference in your business’ success.
In October of 2008, consultant David Bork published a small book filled with common sense advice and tips for business families, and family businesses. The Little Red Book of Family Business is full of pragmatic perceptions and useful practices covering issues from attitudes to wills.
On decision making Bork writes:
Families often fall into the trap of having everyone in the family involved in making all decisions. This family pattern of involving everyone is symptomatic of a business that does not have clarity of roles, responsibility and accountability for different things.[1]
On practices and policies:
In family businesses, one can craft an elegant business solution, but the keys to implementation are always locked up in the family psychology. If you pay attention to the elegant solution and the family psychology, you will be more successful in your implementation rate, and your satisfaction quotient and will be much higher.[2]
[1] David Bork, The Little Red Book of Family Business. (Sampson Press: Coda Corporation, 2008), 46.
[2] Bork, 65.
All family businesses—and all families—at one time or another face conflict. And it can be extreme. Understanding what triggers conflict and how it develops is useful. Understanding how to manage it is even more important—serious advice offered by family-business consultants Doug Baumoel and Blair Trippe in their new book “Deconstructing Conflict: Understanding Family Business, Shared Wealth and Power.”
In the course of their analysis of conflict in family business, Baumoel and Trippe argue that conflict plays a valuable role in our development; that only through being challenged by conflict do we learn, grow, and advance as individuals, families, companies, and as a society. Further, they submit that it is possible to learn how to manage family business conflict in ways that ensure the success of families and their businesses for generations to come.
Left unaddressed, they warn us, conflict leads to erosion of relationships and waste of valuable resources and opportunities.
The authors have developed an equation by which they can help a family enterprise understand why they are stuck or in conflict and what approaches are needed to move the system forward.
I heard Doug and Blair speak about their ‘conflict equation’ this past April at the annual conference of Attorneys for Family Held Enterprises. From their presentation, I took away effective language for discussing conflict, and a viable process for transforming the consequences of conflict from upheaval to growth.
One of my favorite perspectives on family business is that of stewardship, which is an attitude of seeing our responsibility in taking over the family business from our predecessors as a mandate to grow and improve it, and to pass it on to the next generation in better shape and with greater possibilities than it had when we received it.
Several years ago my daughter gave me for Father’s Day a journal entitled A Father’s Legacy—Your Life Story in Your Own Words.
Each page has a question with space to write on themes from a lifetime of experiences—childhood, family life, education, career, love and marriage, parenting. It asks for recollections of time spent with school friends, of summer holidays, the sports I played, my favorite memory of my mother, what I remember about my first date (being nervous, and asking my mother if I could use her car the day after passing my driver’s exam—she said yes), of my greatest joy in being a father—to name a few.
I have been adding to the journal, a little at a time, with increasing appreciation of the thought behind the gift. It is more than a way of passing stories along. It is a way of memorializing the values that built the stories—values that build families.
I know these memories will be cherished, as I cherish the memories of my parents. The success of a family business is in the family. The joy is in the family. Without that, what is there?
