Does Your Family Have A Vision Of The Future Which Is Shared By All Interested Family Members?

Friday 16 March, 2001

by Lucio Dana

Managing the family business successfully is a journey, with the choice of destination determined by the Family's Shared Dream.

The family’s vision or shared dream

The Family's Shared Dream is a Vision of the future that embraces the aspirations of the various family members involved. The Vision helps to engender the excitement, and energy that every family members must have to do the hard work of operating a successful family business.

To succeed, the family has to keep the final destination in mind and understand what it needs to do to get there. The process is about more than the evolution of systems and structures. It is also about the continuous process of change in people's lives, the development and maturation of individuals as they move through life. What unites people and structures in the moving stream of family business is the individual and collective aspirations of family members. Family enterprises are highly personal systems that evoke the same depth of feeling in the participants that most people reserve for their children and their marriages. Too often, elaborate strategic and business plans go unrealised because these deeper psychological factors have not been taken into consideration.

An ongoing inter-generational dialogue.

The process of managing family businesses is pushed along by an ongoing inevitable dialogue between family members with an interest in the business, in which individuals grope toward some common vision of the future that will enable them to work together to achieve success and continuity. Investing time and resources in formulating elaborate strategic and succession plans without first addressing the Dream or Vision and aspirations of family members is likely to be both wasteful and ineffective.

Every plan requires a vision of the future. In a family enterprise such a vision cannot be constructed without first addressing the Dreams of those who have a legitimate interest in the family business and whose ongoing involvement and support are the preconditions for its success. Developing and articulating a Shared Dream is the process through which business families formulate the compelling vision of the future necessary for negotiating the difficulties and challenges that confront the business and the family on a day to day basis.

Family business success and continuity requires that the individual Dream of different family members with an interest in the business be woven together into a shared, collective Dream. This shared dream sets the context within which the performance of respective roles and the assumptions of respective responsibilities and obligations can take place effectively and harmoniously.

Realising one's career and lifestyle aspirations in the family business.

The widespread disillusionment with large corporate bureaucracies in recent years, has made joining the family business a more attractive career option for young people. The greater numbers attracted to such careers place a heavy burden on the family business to provide an expanding workplace within which family members may realise their career and lifestyle aspirations.

A critical question for family business owner-managers

Is your family business such a workplace? If not, can it be made into such a workplace? Would that be worth it?

The above article is excerpted with some modifications from Lansberg, I., Succeeding Generations: Realising the Dream of families in business. 1999, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, Massachusetts. to which readers are referred.

Source:ceoonline.com