Business Case Studies, Executive Interviews, Kelin E Gersick on Family Business

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Executive Interviews: Interview with Kelin E Gersick on Family Business
May 2007 - By Dr. Nagendra V Chowdary


Prof. Kelin E Gersick
Co-founder and a Senior Partner of Lansberg
Gersick & Associates (LGA),
a research and consulting firm.
He is a Management Fellow at the Yale School of Organization and Management.


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  • Congratulations for having coauthored very successful and powerful books on managing family businesses. What was the powerful trigger that has prompted you to embark on research in family-run businesses?
    Early in my career, I had experience in three different parts of psychology: as an academic researcher and professor, as a management consultant and as a family therapist. I thought they would remain separate streams throughout my career; but in the early 1980s I met a few other colleagues who were beginning to work with and study family businesses. It was a perfect integration of my most important interests and my research; and consultation with family businesses began then.

  • Can you tell us briefly about two of your books, Generations of Giving: Leadership and Continuity in Family Foundations and Generation to Generation: Life Cycles of the Family Business.
    The Generation to Generation book came out of our experience with a range of family companies in the late 1980s and early 1990s. We were aware that there was no comprehensive model for the development of these businesses that took into account the ownership, business and family dimensions. I was a full-time professor at the time, so I had the opportunity to write the book as a statement of our model and our experience at that point. Even though we have continued to evolve our thinking since then, I still believe in the basic model of development of family enterprise that the book presents. As for Generations of Giving, that research began as a partnership between our firm, LGA and the National Center for Family Philanthropy. They sponsored a multi year intensive research project on continuity and inter generational governance in family foundations. That was a hard book to write, because we ended up with a mountain of very rich qualitative data on 30 complex family foundations narrowing it down to the essential lessons was difficult and took three years. I am very proud of that work, because it opens up a new approach to considering the family and the organizational challenges of excellent family philanthropy, with many lessons for family business as well.

  • Can you share with us about your initial research journey? How could you get in sights into managing family businesses? Was there any difficulty in breaking ice with family run businesses, for, disclosure and divulgence must have been exceptions rather than imperatives.
    I am by nature a social scientist, so it was natural for me to focus in my career on generating as many ideas and testing as many hypotheses as I could. Contrary to what people expect, we have always found that business-owning families are eager to tell their story and to hear the stories of others, if they trust the objectivity of the listener. Entrepreneurs are by nature inquisitive, good observers of the experience of others and skilled processors of information. But in all of our research we have decided to protect anonymity; unless the subject specifically authorizes us to tell their story openly, all of our sources are confidential. That has often been the only way we could have heard the true story. I also believe that all our consulting work is also a form of research. Much of what I have learned about managing family businesses has come from consulting, not just formally designed research.

  • There are so many definitions of a family business. What, according to you, is a family business? What are the different typologies of the family business?
    That depends on what you are using the definition for. In a formal sense, the consensus definition is that family businesses are those companies that are significantly influenced by the members of a family through ownership control or concentration, management control, and/or tradition and informal authority. In our own database on family controlled companies, we focus on the ownership dimension and include all businesses that are controlled by a family, either through outright ownership or ownership influence. As for typologies, I still find our initial developmental categories useful: Controlling owner companies, sibling partnerships, and cousin consortiums. But for the last 15 years we have defined our work as being not just about family businesses, but about family enterprise. This reflects the complex systems that most of the families we work with have developed, including operating companies, holding companies, family offices, philanthropic foundations and pooled investments. That kind of family enterprise and the networks of families who control them, almost defy typology.

  • What, in a family run business system, are womens issues and how should they be addressed?
    I have to say that I am surprised that there have not been more changes in the role of women in family enterprises worldwide. Twenty years ago we would have predicted that by now a very significant proportion of family businesses would have been led by women and while there has been change, it has not gone as far as we expected. The most important womens issue remains how to harness the human capital of the women in the family for the benefit of the enterprise as managers and executives, as directors and as participants in all aspects of governance (boards, family councils, family assemblies, foundations, task forces and family committees). The other issue that is sometimes presented as a womens issue but is really about parenting and families in general, is how to raise energetic, ambitious, well grounded children in families that are second or third generation, with more wealth and opportunity than their parents experienced until much later in their lives.

  • In a family run business, how to foster change management? Are there any best practices that you would recommend?
    About 10 years ago we spent a lot of time and effort thinking about the change process, and I think the model that we came up with for transitions is still my best thinking on that topic. It is summarized in the beginning of the book Generations of Giving and in other articles. It is based on five phases of a transition: preparation, disengagement from the status quo, exploration, choice, and commitment.

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