Practitioner Perspectives

Advising enterprising families calls for more than just business savvy; it requires understanding trust, legacy, and emotion. While advisors are often skilled in governance and strategy, many overlook the “human architecture” that truly drives family enterprise success. Below, we explore how to bridge this critical gap.

The New Ideas in Family Firms Conference is an invitation-only thought leadership platform that was launched in 2018 to bring together a small group of the world’s leading academic researchers and practitioners to discuss the latest ideas in family enterprise research and advisory work.

CBS Professor Rita McGrath shared her expertise on innovation in times of uncertainty. Her latest book, Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen, explores how to harness disruptive influences early for a strategic advantage.

The panelists on this session gave us an inside look at the missions and family dynamics in family offices. They spoke about some of the difficulties of keeping younger family members engaged as family businesses grow, and also highlighted some things to consider when deciding who should run a family’s office and how they should do it.

In this article, as a lawyer who has worked closely with family businesses, I offer seven suggestions to consider for families who are struggling with an adult child who works at the company and has not yet launched.

Family business owners and their advisors spend a lot of time and money seeking to optimize business performance and family relationships. Many useful tools have been developed over the years, including generally accepted “best practices,” such as employment, compensation and succession plans.