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Perpetuating the Family Business: 50 Lessons Learned from Long-Lasting, Successful Families in Business

Perpetuating the Family Business is John Ward’s latest book on establishing and maintaining effective family businesses. Ward is a prolific author in this area of entrepreneurship. He has authored and co-authored several books including Keeping the Family Business Healthy, Creating Effective Boards for Private Enterprises, and with Randel Carlock, Strategic Planning for the Family Business. Ward has also produced numerous articles and monographs, many dealing with various aspects of owning and operating a family business. As he states in the beginning of this last book, his expertise has grown out of working with and researching family businesses over the last 25 years. The organization of Perpetuating the Family Business is very straightforward. Ward introduces ‘five insights,’ ‘four P’s,’ and 50 lessons. These are distillations of information about effective family business management he has presented in earlier works, but without the same level of detail. Moreover, they are structured within a development model that follows the progression of a family business from Stage I as Owner-Managed, through Stage II as a Sibling Partnership, to Stage III as a Cousin Collaboration. Ward’s model is the basis for Gersick et al.’s (1997) ownership axis of their family business developmental model minus the family and management dimensions. Focusing solely on ownership stages simplifies understanding how the insights, four P’s, and 50 lessons are individually distributed across these three stages. Structuring the book with his developmental model, Ward illustrates how various ideas translate as similar lessons across the stages. For example, Lesson 9 in Stage I urges family business owners to become a ‘family business student,’ by educating themselves about family businesses in general through formal and informal mechanisms. This principle of education is transformed in Stage II with Lesson 19, ‘Next Generation Early Education,’ and Lesson 24, ‘Education of the In-Laws.’ In Stage III, the educational emphasis translates as Lesson 35, ‘Education for Responsible Ownership,’ and Lesson 39, ‘Family Education.’ By following its developmental trajectory, Ward demonstrates how education must not only remain an important objective; he also shows how it must change to meet the growing demands of the business in all three stages. By Ward’s admission, Perpetuating the Family Business is a book that states its first premise as ‘The most critical issues facing business-owning families are family-based issues more than they are business-based issues’ (p. 6). It is not a book that will explain how to develop successful business strategic plans; the reader is referred to Carlock and Ward’s (2001) Strategic Planning for the Family Business for a detailed assessment of that process. It is not a how-to book for families in business together. It addresses, in thumbnail sketches, policies and practices of successful family businesses from both a business perspective and a family perspective. Thirty-one of the 50 lessons place the family perspective first. As Ward states, it is not the business planning strategy that gets the business into the second and succeeding generations; it is the family. Accordingly, the insights Reviews