Let us start with a background observation by Angela Merkel who states:
Family Businesses typically seem to be:
more long-term
take responsibility in society
are often socially engaged
In sum: Family Business tends to represent both freedom and responsibility!*
Let us now review three key take-home implications for business, according to Schwass and Glemser:
Issue One: It is key to develop one´s own Family Business Brands, whenever possible. Typically, these give large economic advantage to society! But how does one build such family business brands? Building family brands seems to be based on the overlap between three different factors:
Intersection between Family, Ownership and Business
There will often be centrifugal forces that might contribute to pull family business brands apart. A strong, evolving family business brand constitutes a centripetal force, a counter-balancing force, and might then eventually even hold the family business brand together.
Issue Two: Case Study Insights: The book reports on 15 case studies regarding how to build family business brands: Lego (Denmark); Odebrecht (Brazil); Patek-Philippe (Switzerland); Lundin (Sweden); Ayala (Philippines); Bata (Canada); Lee Kum Kee (China); Henkel (Germany); Bonnier (Sweden); Bavaria (Netherlands); Firmenich (Switzerland); Zegna (Italy); J.M. Huber (USA); Royal Selangor (Malaysia); Puig (Spain). Each of these case studies are also published as cases, available from IMD, Lausanne. The case-studies reveal that there seem to be several additional key features which might be important for developing strong family business brands:
Scalability of basic business concept (example: Lego)
Entrepreneurialism (Lundin)
Vision (Firmenich)
Ability to learn from mistakes (Ayala)
Issue Three: Dynamic development. Each family generation should attempt to add its own innovative feature to the business, and, hence also ensure the dynamic development of the family brand! A challenge, when it comes to continuous development in family business contexts, might be that there typically are many paradoxes in play, such as:
Stability and dynamism
Tradition and innovation
It seems key that the family can open up to innovation even though family business often is a mainstay of more traditional values.
*Merkel, A. (2014), 1st European Family Business Summit, Berlin. http://www.bundesregierung.de/Content/DE/Rede/2014/11/2014-11-25-familienunternehmerkonferenz.hhml;jsessionid-EC40486B8DEF40B565B49C5620F601B.sl1z
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