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.

The challenge faced by family businesses and their stakeholders, is to recognise the issues that they face, understand how to develop strategies to address them and more importantly, to create narratives, or family stories that explain the emotional dimension of the issues to the family. The most intractable family business issues are not the business problems the organisation faces, but the emotional issues that compound them. Applying psychodynamic concepts will help to explain behaviour and will enable the family to prepare for life cycle transitions and other issues that may arise. Here is a new understanding and a broader perspective on the human dynamics of family firms with two complementary frameworks, psychodynamic and family systematic, to help make sense of family-run organisations. Although this book includes a conceptual section, it is first and foremost a practical book about the real world issues faced by business families. The book begins by demonstrating that many years of achievement through generations can be destroyed by the next, if the family fails to address the psychological issues they face. By exploring cases from famous and less well known family businesses across the world, the authors discuss entrepreneurs, the entrepreneurial family and the lifecycles of the individual and the organisation. They go on to show how companies going through change and transition can avoid the pitfalls that endanger both family and company. The authors then apply tools that will help family businesses in transition and offer their analyses and conclusions. Readers should draw their own conclusions from careful examination of the cases, identifying the problems or dilemmas faced and the options for improved business performance and family relationships. They should ask what they might have done in the given situation and what new insight into individual or family behaviour each case offers. The goal is to avoid a bitter ending.

A comprehensive guide to every aspect of managing a family-owned firm.

Jane Hilburt-Davis and W. Gibb Dyer-- two of the country's foremost experts in the field of family business-- offer in one comprehensive volume a systematic approach for developing the skills and competencies you need to consult with these unique systems. This practical, hands-on resource shows you how to manage each stage of the consulting process-- from the first contact to the last-- and reveals how to plan strategically and deal with the complex relationship issues that are commonplace in family businesses.

Generation to Generation will help managers understand the special dynamics & challenges that family businesses face as they move through their life cycles. It explains how to handle succession, & the role of non-family professionals.

Learn how to overcome the paradox of family business, and understand that synergy of the two entities will bring greater success than choosing one over the other

Whether big or small, global or local, family businesses are the engine of wealth and security for owners, families, employees, and business as a whole. But as this book shows, that engine can easily break down: If the family, ownership, and business circles related to the business fail to hold regular and candid conversations that clarify ownership's intent for the business and the rules for family members' ownership of and employment in the company And if the business fails to run itself on solid, independent business principles Using an entertaining case study of a composite company, Blooms Floral, the authors coach readers in how to conduct these conversations to ensure that future generations of their family business not only survive, but thrive.