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Navigate the complex decisions and critical relationships necessary to create and sustain a healthy family business—and business family.

Though "family business" may sound like it refers only to mom-and-pop shops, businesses owned by families are among the most significant and numerous in the world. But surprisingly few resources exist to help navigate the unique challenges you face when you share the executive suite, financial statements, and holidays. How do you make the right decisions, critical to the long-term survival of any business, with the added challenge of having to do so within the context of a family?

The HBR Family Business Handbook brings you sophisticated guidance and practical advice from family business experts Josh Baron and Rob Lachenauer. Drawing on their decades-long experience working closely with a wide range of family businesses of all sizes around the world, the authors present proven methods and approaches for communicating effectively, managing conflict, building the right governance structures, and more.

In the HBR Family Business Handbook you'll find:

  • A new perspective on what makes family businesses succeed and fail
  • A framework to help you make good decisions together
  • Step-by-step guidance on managing change within your business family
  • Key questions about wealth, unique to family businesses, that you can't afford to ignore
  • Assessments to help you determine where you are—and where you want to go
  • Stories of real companies, from Marchesi Antinori to Radio Flyer
  • Chapter summaries you can use to reinforce what you've learned

Keep this comprehensive guide with you to help you build, grow, and position your family business to thrive across generations.

HBR Handbooks provide ambitious professionals with the frameworks, advice, and tools they need to excel in their careers. With step-by-step guidance, time-honed best practices, and real-life stories, each comprehensive volume helps you to stand out from the pack—whatever your role.

Table of Contents

  1. Cover
  2. Series Page
  3. Title Page
  4. Copyright
  5. Contents
  6. Introduction: Understanding Your Family Business
  7. Part One: Cracking the Code of Your Family Business
    1. 1. Decode Your Family Business
    2. The impact of individuals
    3. Make-or-break relationships
    4. System dynamics
    5. Summing up
    6. 2. The Power of Family Ownership
    7. The hidden pyramid
    8. The power to destroy
    9. The power to sustain
    10. The five rights of family owners
    11. Summing up
  8. Part Two: The Five Rights of Family Owners
    1. 3. Design: Choose the Type of Family Ownership You Want
    2. What type of family ownership do you want?
    3. Understanding the current and future implications of your ownership type
    4. Changing your type of family ownership
    5. Summing up
    6. 4. Decide: Structure Governance to Make Great Decisions Together
    7. The Four-Room model
    8. Structures: form your Four Rooms
    9. Processes: integrate across rooms
    10. Overhaul your governance
    11. Summing up
    12. 5. Value: Create an Owner Strategy to Define Your Success
    13. The right to define value: growth, liquidity, and control
    14. Defining purpose in a business family
    15. Setting owner goals
    16. Creating owner guardrails
    17. Developing your Owner Strategy statement
    18. Summing up
    19. 6. Inform: Use Effective Communication to Build Trusted Relationships
    20. Building trust
    21. The trade-off between transparency and privacy
    22. Drafting your communication plan
    23. Summing up
    24. 7. Transfer: Plan for the Transition to the Next Generation
    25. The right to transfer: 2G or not 2G?
    26. The essential elements of successful continuity planning
    27. How to set continuity planning in motion
    28. Summing up
  9. Part Three: Challenges You Will Face
    1. 8. The Business Family: Four Disruptions You Will Face and What to Do about Them
    2. Death in the family
    3. New people entering the business family
    4. Inequality
    5. Behavioral health issues
    6. How to stabilize after a disruption
    7. Summing up
    8. 9. Working in a Family Business
    9. Deciding to work in your family business
    10. Joining the business as an in-law
    11. Preparing for life under the microscope
    12. Thriving as an outsider in a family business
    13. Summing up
    14. 10. Family Employment Policy
    15. Decide how to attract the talent in your family
    16. Create entry rules for family employees
    17. Plan family employee career paths
    18. Design feedback and development for family employees
    19. Compensate family employees
    20. Prepare an exit path for family employees
    21. Draft your family employment policy
    22. Summing up
    23. 11. How to Be Responsible with the Wealth of Your Family Business
    24. Protect the golden goose
    25. Build a portfolio to last generations
    26. Prepare your family to be responsible with its wealth
    27. Summing up
    28. 12. Conflict in the Family Business
    29. Finding the Goldilocks zone of conflict
    30. Moving from fake harmony to constructive conflict
    31. The conflict spiral: from diverging interests to family wars
    32. Escaping a family feud
    33. Avoiding the conflict spiral
    34. Summing up
    35. 13. The Family Office in a Family Business
    36. The functions of a family office
    37. How to know if you need a family office
    38. Types of family offices
    39. Building out your family office
    40. Deciding when to close your family office
    41. Summing up
    42. 14. The Dangers of Losing What You’ve Built
    43. Recognizing warning signs that you might be losing control
    44. Maintaining your family values
    45. Responding to an economic crisis
    46. Summing up
  10. Conclusion: The Good Journey, Together
  11. Notes
  12. Further Reading
  13. Index
  14. Acknowledgments
  15. About the Authors
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