What All Family Businesses Can Learn From the Merck Family

The German Merck family has succeeded where many business families have failed: keeping a group of 319 family members, including 204 family shareholders, unified, aligned and committed over the course of 350 years. Through 13 generations of family ownership, the family has learned what it takes to keep the business in the family for the long haul: effective business and family governance, strong family relationships and systematic ownership competence development.

What can others learn from the Merck family? This article by Tom A. Rüsen, Claudia Binz Astrachan and Frank Stangenberg-Haverkamp offers some key takeaways as well as questions that family business leaders can ask themselves.