It’s not just your family who gains from a family consultation, your employer, school, and local community will benefit too. This is because you will feel able, and want, to contribute more, which in time will bring you public esteem and this will benefit you.
Successful families have always been networked into their communities. In the past this meant their village, or local neighborhood, but today we live in a global village and the better connections you have, both locally and internationally the more your family will prosper.
Unfortunately not all families, or branches of families, know how to communicate effectively, and for business families this spells disaster.
Powerful families become examples and models for others. These may, of course, be either positive or negative. Even successful families at times come under pressure to conform and adopt behaviors that aren’t necessarily in their best interest.
Everything changes but not everyone likes change. Change sometimes presents challenges to families who are forced to adapt to new environmental conditions such as: market forces; climatic and political change; as well as the widening interests of the members of whom it is comprised.
No one knows who started the first family business. Tribal society bartered but we believe money was first used in Cappadocia 2250 B.C. in the form of silver ingots. The earliest coins were made in Lydia . Both are now areas of modern Turkey the home of ‘The Family Business School’.
Even in societies where much of commerce was nationalized small family businesses thrived. This even put many family members at risk due to the political climates in which they operated their businesses, yet they persisted, why?
Quite simply because people will always require personalized goods and services, which frankly large conglomerates and state controlled industries are unable to supply. Over 75% of worldwide business today is, according most estimates, family business.
Trading has long fueled communication, diplomacy, and understanding between nations and people. The ancient Phoenicians traded with the Celts of the area comprising the modern British Isles before the Roman invasion of A.D. 43. The Silk Road has brought oriental luxuries from China into Europe for thousand of years.
Not all family business is healthy business. Once profitable enterprises, such as slavery, and modern trading in illicit drugs, is usually enmeshed in violence, corruption, and an unhealthy lifestyle for the families controlling those businesses.
But where families have traded openly, offering useful goods, or services, whole communities have prospered as a result.
It is a truism that most of us prefer to buy from people rather than base their purchasing upon rational decision-making processes. Major brands are associated with people, for example the Virgin brand is associated with the British Billionaire Richard Branson, although he sold the Virgin record label to EMI in 1992. Microsoft is associated in the mind of people with its founder Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs of the rival company Apple Computing another example. For an older generation IBM was thought to be the embodiment of Tom Watson Junior’s philosophy.
Marketers capitalize upon this, so today we are swimming in a world of such brand names as: Lacosté, Benetton, Armani, and Tommy Hilfiger. Such branding ascribes to products ‘human virtues’ and customers identify with these.
A successful family business will be a themed business, probably rooted in the personality of the founder and formed in the first years of its operation. This is a virtue and a problem as the company grows and diversifies. The founder may be long dead but his spirit may haunt the organization like a ghost in a machine. Symptoms of this frequently include a lack of willingness to step beyond the founder’s original methods into new technology, or attempts to completely break with tradition that fail because they are based upon rebellion rather than innovation.
Such difficulties require careful management and knowledgeable guidance. The involvement of trained family business consultants may benefit family companies suffering multiple symptoms as a result of these maladies.
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