The Two Sides of the Business Family

This book focuses on a central success factor for family businesses: maintaining the decision-making ability over generations while avoiding jeopardising the business due to family conflicts, inefficient governance structures or lack of identification. The authors identify that this is not as easy, as the endeavour to bring together two social systems with contradicting logics (family and business) leads to many dangerous pitfalls. This book presents the outcomes of a unique research project in which family managers of 11 of the oldest and largest German family businesses enduring to at least the fourth generation met regularly for more than three years and presented the elements of their family governance structure to each other and to the authors. It was a joint learning journey that identified 12 core questions that these families have been trying to answer to maintain a successful relationship between the family and the business over generations. Obviously, there is no right answer to these questions; rather, engaging the families in a process to discover their own answers and provide awareness of the two distinct sides of being a family and being a business family are the keys to success.