Here's a book written for members of family businesses that is both practical and thoughtful. It includes twelve chapters, concluding with an "Outline for Family Business Education". It's filled with exercises that the reader can use to discover things like, "How Well the Family Works Together" ; or even "Rating Advisor Candidates". The authors', all members of the Aspen Family Business Group, goal in writing this book is to help families "who are in all states of health".  (Read more from Jane Hilburt-Davis and add comments).

 

 Take a sample of legal and accounting advisors and family owners; how far do advisers perceive that they understand the particular needs and characteristics of family businesses and business families? And how far do the families agree with them? What is the gap?

 STEP (the Society Trust and Estate Practitioners) is starting a process of trying to quantify family business understanding amongst its 17,000 members worldwide - and hopefully with some groups of family owners. (Read more from David Harvey and add comments).

 

 Depending on the evolution of the family business and the nature of the family dynamics, the use of a "Management Table" (MT) approach as a grooming tool for the next generation can assist both the current owners/leaders and the future owners/leaders in ensuring an effective transition of the family business.

 

Assuming that the current owner is willing to transition the ownership of the family business to the next generation and there is no clear heir apparent or leader at this time, the use of this Management Table approach will allow the current owner to gradually let go of the controls while enabling the next generation to gradually assume responsibility for the operational controls.

(Read more from Grant Walsh and add comments).

Craig Aronoff opened this Master Class by describing Six Requirements for Successful Boards:

While defining their employment guidelines, one of my client families concluded their discussion with the following:

 

"Family employees must be both competent and passionate about business to be successful at our company. Family employees who feel an obligation or duty to be successors, but are not passionate, will become miserable going to work every day and should, therefore not be employed at the company. Instead the family should support, nurture and encourage them to pursue their true passions."

 

Family members are often drawn to the family business either through the obligations of legacy or the security of employment and fail to discover their own true journey to live a life of meaning and fulfillment.

 

To move forward on the journey to embrace one's passions, successors and their families should consider the following:

 

1. Leave Home - In Homer's classic tale, Odysseus leaves home on his hero's journey, faces many challenges, finds himself and then returns home.  (Read more from Dean Fowler and add comments.)

  

What leads family enterprises to succeed and flourish across generations? 

In this video interview, Dirk Junge contends that sound governance must reside at the intersection of family and enterprise.  Sound governance results in strong leadership, effective communication, conflict resolution, and successful succession.  Sound governance holds the family and enterprise together even in the midst of the "volatile cocktail of love, power and money."   (Click here to see the video).  (Special bonus:  click here to see the "Governance/Succession Checklist" which Dirk uses when speaking with a family enterprise).

  

A family business leader recently expressed her concern to me about an advisor her family had met with. He was focused on a long-term relationship, where the family would need his services on an ongoing basis. She was concerned that if her family engaged him, they would become reliant on his services. In her view, the role of a family advisor was completely the opposite: to build skills and independence in the family and its individual members.

 

  

What separates a thriving family enterprise from one that is merely surviving? All too often family businesses struggle and stall during generational change. The secret to those that thrive through transition and beyond may be in their ability to continue to embrace and support the entrepreneurial traits and mindset that were present in the early days of the business.

 

We now know that entrepreneurship can be learned and propelled with the right balance of supports. Entrepreneurs begin to thrive when they have conquered fear, when they are free to focus on areas of strength and interest, when their business growth is an outcome of strategic design, when they assemble and lead reliable teams forward, when they have built the business after blue prints of their own imagining and when they've achieved a healthy work-life balance. The same may be said for entrepreneurial minded family enterprises.  (Read more from Thomas Ulbrich and add comments.)

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