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The Family Business Book

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The Family Business Book

A roadmap for entrepreneurial families to prosper across generations

FT Publishing,

15 min read
9 take-aways
Text available

What's inside?

Family businesses can survive multiple generations – but only with cooperation and communication.

Editorial Rating

9

getAbstract Rating

  • Analytical
  • Overview
  • Concrete Examples

Recommendation

Family business is the world’s most powerful economic engine. These companies account for the lion’s share of global GDP, but two out of three fail to survive past the first generation. Alfredo De Massis and Emanuela Rondi offer a learned exploration of family businesses and the forces that affect them. Anyone who is working in or with a family business, especially family members in positions of leadership, will learn something useful here. The authors include charts, activities, and talking points to enable entrepreneurial families to plan ahead.

Summary

Most businesses are family businesses.

Family companies account for as much as nine-tenths of global GDP. The general public supports the idea of family businesses, which people regard as more solicitous and genuine. Family enterprises have dominated the business landscape for centuries, and some trace their pedigree back before Shakespeare’s time. While two-thirds of family firms don’t survive the first generation, one of every eight endures to the third generation.

Many of those who inherit family businesses find that their sense of responsibility to the founding family members wanes over time. Their advisors often prioritize the needs of the business above those of the people involved. Many studies of family firms focus on commercial concerns instead of on the needs and priorities of the people who lead the company.

Such research uses the “three circle model,” which examines “family, ownership, and business” as three separate spheres. Frictions develop where these spheres intersect. Analytical models can’t fully illuminate the complexity and varying nuances of personal relationships, individual degrees of active participation in the business, and each...

About the Authors

Alfredo De Massis is a Professor of Entrepreneurship & Family Business at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. Emanuela Rondi is an Associate Professor at the Department of Management at the Universita degli Studi di Bergamo. 

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