This book provides an extensive overview of family business-related topics such as context and uniqueness, lifecycle and ownership configurations, conflict management, corporate governance, succession challenges, internationalization, innovation, and socioemotional wealth. Each chapter features clear learning objectives, key concepts and terminology, and dedicated case studies to demonstrate the main messages. The book not only considers the day-to-day dynamics in family businesses, but also places substantial emphasis on the entrepreneurial skills needed for these businesses to survive and thrive, today and tomorrow. In addition, it elaborates and discusses a number of best practice examples, which offer valuable guidance not only for scholars, but also for students who wish to study these challenges.

The authors explore how effective planning and communication helps business families around the world address growth challenges as they strive to become high performing multi-generation family enterprises. This book shows family businesses working together at their best.

Deals with the issue of entrepreneurship and family business. This title considers the issues, problems, contexts, or processes that make a family firm more entrepreneurial. It covers topics such as the emergence and growth of family businesses, and the use of entrepreneurial policies, practices and strategies by family firms.

Discover What Makes Family Businesses Beat the Odds and Thrive over Generations Families are complicated; family businesses even more so. Like other companies, family-run enterprises must develop leadership and entrepreneurial skills. But they must also manage family dynamics that rarely mirror the best practices in the latest Harvard Business Review. Allan Cohen and Pramodita Sharma, scholars with deep professional and personal roots in family businesses, show how enterprising families can transmit the hunger for excellence across generations. Using examples of firms that flourished and those that failed, they describe the practices that characterize entrepreneurial individuals, families, and organizations and offer pragmatic advice that can be tailored to your unique situation.

Family businesses—the predominant form of business organization around the world—can make numerous, critical contributions to the economy and family well-being in both financial and qualitative terms. But dysfunctional family businesses can be difficult to manage, painful experiences at best, and they can destroy family wealth and personal relationships. This book explores the dynamics of family business management, in the context of constantly changing market conditions and the role that knowledge management plays in strategic planning and adaptation. Integrating the literature from family business, entrepreneurship, industrial psychology, and knowledge management, and with illustrative examples from a variety of enterprises, the authors address such topics as: •How family businesses can compete in the new knowledge economy •How to manage a family business when knowledge is its main asset •How to transfer knowledge (and how to keep it alive) through family generations Within this framework, the authors argue that effective resource management—especially intangible resources—is central to enabling a family-run organization to maintain a sustainable competitive advantage over time. They note that families often develop systemic, intuitive, or tacit knowledge that transcends rational decision making and needs to be recognized and nurtured as a distinctive asset. The authors demonstrate that trans-generational value is achieved when the family firm innovates and adapts itself to changing external and internal conditions. This kind of entrepreneurial performance requires dynamic capabilities and processes designed to acquire, exchange, combine and even shed knowledge and practices; and, in turn, dynamic capabilities result from mechanisms of knowledge sharing, collective learning, experience accumulation, and transfer.

Family business is the most prominent form of business organization, and its importance to the global economy cannot be under-estimated. Until recently, the impact of the family on entrepreneurial firms has been under-researched, leading to a conceptual gap between the two areas of study, and an underestimation of the contribution of family systems to entrepreneurial success. Starting from the consideration that family is an intimate and essential aspect of entrepreneurship, this book considers connections between family, family members, entrepreneurial behavior, family business, society and the economy. Bringing together a unique range of international contributions, it offers new theoretical perspectives and empirical insights as well as an in-depth consideration of the diversity of contexts and processes associated with entrepreneurship in family settings. Above all, this book opens up a comprehensive research agenda on the linkages between family, family firms and entrepreneurship and will be of interest to researchers, educators and advanced students of entrepreneurship, small firms and family business.

The Soul of Family Business by Tom Hubler takes readers on a journey throught the heart and soul of family business. Using case studies from his more than thirty-five-years as a family business consultant, Hubler explores what it takes to run a successful family business, illustrating how love is the foundation and family values are the secret sauce for success.