Tag Archives: The Family Business Leader™

01/3/18

Thoughts On The New Year

The Holiday Season has come and gone, with it’s festivities and colors lighting up the winter darkness. And it’s January 1st once more. We have again accomplished that crossing between year’s end and another beginning.

As we reflect on this crossing, make promises or resolutions. and set our sights on the challenges and adventures that beckon ahead, we may pause to contemplate that yet another year of our life has gone by.

One can see time as passing by, and we can also see that we are travelers, participants on a journey of possibilities from youth to the wisdom of old age—through days, months and years.

It is a journey not to be feared, writes Thomas Moore in his book Ageless Soul, The Lifelong Journey Toward Meaning and Joy.[1] Rather, he writes, it should be embraced and cherished. In Moore’s view, aging is the process by which one becomes a more distinctive, complete, fulfilled, loving, and connected person. May this be, in 2018, a promise for you and all your loved ones.

We, at The Family Business Leader™, wish you and all your family
a very wonderful and prosperous New Year.

 

1  Moore. Thomas. (2010) Ageless Soul: The Lifelong Journey Toward Meaning and Joy, New York, New York: St. Martin’s Press.

 

04/14/16

More Than ‘Do No Harm’

I saw my internist recently, and we started to talk about a book written by neurosurgeon Henry Marsh, entitled “Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery.” In it the author gives a viscerally disturbing account of what can go wrong in surgery and with the brain itself. He speaks about risk, he speaks about his growing experience and skill and he speaks about caring.

During this conversation my mind jumped, by association, to a principle of family business called stewardship.[1]

As a steward of my family business my leadership role is to receive the business from my predecessors, grow the business, the family wealth, the family itself, and then pass this multifaceted inheritance on to the next generation in better shape than it was in when I received it. More than do no harm, stewardship of a family business aims at building health and vigor and creating an ever greater family legacy.

The challenges of stewardship change as the business develops. The responsibilities of sole proprietorship differ from those carried by the head of a business with family members working in management or as employees. It changes when the founder’s children are born, and changes too when brothers, sisters and cousins become part of the picture.

At The Family Business Leader™ we help you meet the varied challenges of family-business stewardship and bequeath a healthy and vigorous inheritance to your family’s next generation… and the next.

[1] According to The Family Business Leader™: “Stewardship is defined as “a perspective that founding family members view the firm as an extension of themselves and therefore view the continuing health of the enterprise as connected with their own personal well-being.” http://www.familybusinesswiki.org/Stewardship