Stakeholders in Family Firms
The greatest threats to the progress, success and endurance of the family firm are familial relationships. Stakeholders which are mainly considered in the planning process are spouse, children, employees and their families, vendors, suppliers, consumers and the community. It is important to ensure that if there is going to be a transition in leadership, the people who are selected are well-qualified enough. Not only are the employees to be considered, but their families who are dependent on them should be considered as well. The success of customers, suppliers and vendors is entirely dependent on the degree of success of the family firm. They have an indirect investment in your company. The community is dependent on your financial as well as social deeds. Contribution of services and manpower, charity, and taxes make you an important part of the community, and the community comes to depend on the organization.
Succession in Family Business
In family businesses, the owners of the company are very concerned with building a legacy for their successor. Succession planning involves the decision of leading the company in the next generation. Less than one-third of family firms endure the transition from the first generation to the second, and 13% of family firms remain in the industry for more than 60 years. There is no time spent in preparing the company and its people for the change. There is very little thought imparted to the process of
Basically, Bob did well in establishing advisory board, including CEO, COO, and financial expertise and Marketing expertise, who have the family-owned background or service industry background. Also, there was one female member who would be able to help the company better understand the female customers or help the female family member to involve in the family business. With the development of company, Bob added new members to the board according to the business needs. This is another good point.
Bob’s rationale behind establishing an advisory board, and his approach for selecting its members, has thus far been successful and valuable for him and the company. He correctly recognized the importance of “the big picture,” as he chose people whose backgrounds covered a wide range of industries and skills and who could therefore fill in any gaps. Furthermore, Bob’s choices were all successful business professionals, so he could therefore be relatively sure that they would be effective in handling any future challenges and recognizing future opportunities. Bob was also cognizant that the business and the family needed unbiased consultants in order to offer advice regarding family employment, and establishing the advisory board presented an outlet in which family members could privately discuss any issues on their mind. Lastly, he established an objective for the board, in that the board would only focus on the “big picture,” which meant that they didn’t get caught in the daily details or argue over the day-to-day routine.
The immediate issue is to make a decision on the future of the family company.
The organisation is family owned, with three family members acting as a Management Board and responsible for approving all business decisions.
CIPD (2) defines Succession Planning as ‘a process for identifying and developing potential future leaders or senior managers, as well as individuals to fill other business-critical positions, either in the short- or the long-term’.
Personal stakeholders are individuals or organizations that influence my decision making either by shaping it or being influence by it. To better understand those who have a stake in my life I drew a chart using a set of inner and outer circles to visualize those with direct and indirect influence. In the center of the chart sit me, with four main categories of stakeholders: Family, Job, Government, and Community.
This example demonstrates how important it is to take everyone’s opinion into consideration in the process of succession. Even if some family members are not actively running
Strategic model is an approach that looks at the action causing the problem, and how the therapist can convinced the family to change the behavior to solve the problem (Metcalf, 2011). Strategic therapist believes the problem stem from communication, therefore the job of therapist is to alter the way in which the family communicate (Metcalf, 2011). The strategic model can help in the referral process because the focus is on the problem. In the article making a referral for family therapy, it looks at the level of difficulty of school counselor making referral for children along with their family to therapy(Whiteside, 1993).. I believe in most cases parents see their child struggling, therefore they would do anything to assist their child even
Type II agency problems are prevalent in family owned public corporations because the controlling shareholders (the family) may prioritize their personal interests over the interests of the corporation as a whole.
Succession planning is a strategic approach to ensure that necessary talent and skills will be available when needed, and that essential knowledge and abilities will be maintained when employees in critical positions leave. The smooth operation and future development of IT systems are indispensable to a company. Succession planning in the IT department is critical because you want to make sure the business is always prepared and protected while the technology’s role as a business enabler continues to grow. It is also particularly important in high tech because the field is so specialized and ever changing. An executive can never be in a position where he/she is leaving the business, worried about getting the support the organization will
Even though the stakeholder theory of the firm served as a comprehensive fundamentally solid concept for corporate social responsibility to branch out of; without the stakeholder theory of the firm there is no corporate social responsibility and vice versa, because business cannot exist without society and society is not sustainable without business, due to advancements in the modern world, business and society have evolved, and traditional business theories have a narrow business scope, while contemporary perspectives have a broader approach.
This week’s reading starts with a Chapter 2 Transition and Change. After reviewing the chapter for a second time there were a few nuggets that stood out to the reader, nuggets that would be very beneficial to be mindful of when assisting family businesses with transitions and changes. As stated last week the Godrej Group provides four characteristics of a family firm that will help protect the sources of their past success and at the same time, seek needed innovation. (Schuman, A., Stutz, S., & Ward, J.L. 2012, p. 38). This concept includes the complex successor dilemmas. This component was best summarized by a quote from Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh which states “Change does not change tradition. It strengthens it. Change is a
In order to distinguish family-controlled and non-family-controlled firms, I apply the family-controlled business criteria proposed by The Family Business Magazine: a single family controls the company’s ownership, the controlling family members are active in the top management, and the family has been involved in the company for at least two generations. Family businesses constitute a highly important component of the US business community. An estimated 80 percent of the total 15 million businesses within the American economy are family businesses. In the US, 50 percent to 60 percent of the total Gross National Product are provided by family-controlled firms. The other 40 percent to 50 percent is supplied by non-family-controlled firms.
In this week’s chapter The Ultimate Management Challenge we read about succession plans and what that can mean for a family business. According to the reading about 40% of businesses in the world are family businesses that have more than one generation working for them and will have to come up with a succession plan if they don’t already have one. A Succession plan is simply passing on the business leadership and power from one senior generation to another younger generation. When reading this book I learned a lot about the rags to rags, shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves phenomenon, and why it can and does occur, as well as 2 main things a family business must have to be successful.
Proponents of the knowledge-based theory of the firm point out that this one sided concentration on incentive conflicts in the economics of organizational literature overlooks the production side of the firm. Langlois and Foss, for example, argue that the literature has unreflectively relied on a dichotomy between productive aspects and exchange aspects of the firm, that is, on a dichotomy between production costs and exchange costs. In analyzing exchange costs the literature recognizes that exchange itself is not costless, but involves transaction costs from imperfect knowledge and opportunism. But in analyzing production costs, there has been an embedded agreement that price theory tells us all we need to know about production. As Langlois and Foss point out, however, it is very likely that knowledge about how to produce is imperfect and that knowledge about how to link together one person’s (or organization’s) productive knowledge with that of another is imperfect. These twin issues of capabilities and coordination are discrete from the hazards of astringent that other traditional beliefs have focused on. Both knowledge resources and (imperfect) production costs can be said to vary depending on the attributes of a production process, in the same way that transaction costs differ depending on the asset attributes of investment projects. Thus, instead of holding technology constant across alternative modes of organization as a