“With your stupid ideas, six months after I die you're going to blow up this business.”
That is how Nick Perrino, who built Home Run Inn from a small tavern to a 600-seat restaurant, motivated his son, Joe, as he attempted to step out of the shadow of his father's success.
Nick feared the changes his son pushed for: from smaller changes like implementing a shirt and tie dress code for employees, or introducing booth space to create more seating; to the weightier ones, such as partnering with other companies to grow the company, or automating a manufacturing plant to mass produce its iconic frozen pizza.
“My own father didn't think I would succeed,” says Joe Perrino, CEO of Home Run Inn.
Founded by Nick's in-laws, Italian immigrants Mary and Vincent Grittani, Home Run Inn began as a small southside Chicago tavern that dished up a little piece of Italy—fresh, hot, and free pizza—to its bar patrons. The tavern, whose name, as legend has it, was born after a game-winning home run shattered the tavern's front window, was symbolic of the convergence of the Old World and New. While running the tavern was a swing at the American dream, the family guarded its Italian heritage. Three generations of the Grittani-Perrino family lived behind the restaurant.
“We would have lunch in the kitchen of the restaurant,” says Joe, “and Easter dinner in the restaurant dining room.” During the early years, Home Run Inn was less about building wealth than about preserving a heritage and providing a future for a family, whose impoverished family in the Old World was considered the lowest class—peasant farmers.
When Nick Perrino took over the business after the death of his father-in-law, he never envisioned growing it into the top-selling frozen pizza company in Chicago that it is today.
That took the “stupid” ideas of his son, Joe.
Like the baseball that shattered the tavern's window, Joe shattered the old way of doing business. Nick had kept the business alive during the Al Capone and Bugs Moran era. He sought to do business honestly in a world of gangsters, bribes, and extortion, where business was all about protecting what one had. It was a principle carried from his impoverished days in Italy.
Joe recounts a time he wanted to change their bread supplier. “My dad said, ‘If you do that, they come after our restaurant.’ Dad believed that we needed to act poor, that pizza was for peons, and his oft-repeated advice to live by was to ‘associate with someone better than you, and pay the expense.’”
This was the “gospel of Perrino,” says Joe. “He was a leader in the community, a politician. He held a meeting every Monday, and politicians came from all over. He could have been a congressman.”
When Joe came into leadership, he kicked the kowtowing. Authorities would write up the restaurant for a violation, looking for a take. Instead of paying them off, Joe fixed the problem. The notion that success is built on the association with others better than you was, according to Joe, no better “than a myth.”
“They're not all they're cracked up to be, you know?” Joe says.
This self-confidence was earned early on. Joe was one of the top athletes in the area. America's favorite pastime was Joe's favorite pastime, and while playing baseball he developed the confidence to lead. On the diamond, he took a manager's approach to the game. “I became captain, and would hire and fire kids from the team.” His confidence was matched by decisiveness, which prompted Joe, at the age of 18, to make a career decision that would save his father from making a fateful one.
“He was going to sell the business to our bookkeeper for $200,000. And I said, ‘Dad, I’ll come in, and I'll [run] it.'”
Joe switched his major from dentistry to business and graduated from Lewis University, where he recruited three other graduates to help him expand Home Run Inn into a business enterprise with locations throughout the city.
“I was gung-ho to open up more places,” says Joe. “And then…nothing happened. We just stayed in the same place and got bigger.”
From 1975 to 1987, the restaurant grew exponentially, from 40 seats to 300 to 600. But for Joe it wasn't enough. From his perspective, it was 12 years of doing the same thing over and over. Joe says that the frozen pizza business was something his father never wanted to be in. But Joe forged ahead. By the time Joe hit his early forties, the frozen pizza business hit a home run. And Joe had secured his spot as rightful leader.
In order to take Home Run Inn to the next level, Joe had to find his own way to lead. He had to step out of the mythology of his father, respecting Nick's values while reinventing the business for the future. It is what all successors must do to lead the business into a new era. “Some things [my father] did very, very well,” says Joe. Nick invested in relationships and in the community. “Other things,” says Joe, “we had to break through as a family culture.” One of them was the dominating fear that curtailed the business from expanding. Nick Perrino led in a way consistent with his identity—for the good and the bad: his inherent personality traits, life experiences (like living through the Depression), second-grade education, family values, Italian heritage, and generational influences all combined to shape his values, and consequently, approach to life and leadership. The perspectives of father and son were as distant from one another as the Old World was from the New.
Nick had always looked at the pizza business and saw its limitations; his son looked at it and saw opportunity for innovation, growth, and success. Nick wanted the best for his son, and for him that meant encouraging him to pursue something different than what he considered the lowbrow pizza industry. Joe respected his father, and for him that meant doing the same thing his dad did, but differently. “My father had the leadership style of a dictator—my way only, volatile and explosive when it didn't go his way,” says Joe, “I was an ambassador seeking peace and harmony to achieve our goals.”
Joe Perrino had a more nuanced and constructive understanding than his father did of what it meant to be different. He was able to integrate the best of what his father had done with what he knew would make it exponentially better. This stemmed in part from his personality, brimming with self-confidence and the ability to take command of a situation.
The conflict that Joe experienced with his father is a natural part of the succession process. In order for successors to step out of the shadows of their parents, they have do try to do things differently, in a way that is authentic to them. To do things differently is to invite conflict. No parent or successor should be disheartened by the presence of conflict in the succession process. Conflict is inherent in succession. To truly step into leadership, the successor must chafe against his predecessor's way of doing things. What should be assessed is how healthy that conflict is.
These conflicts are the seeds of a term first coined by psychologist Murray Bowen called differentiation. As I discussed in the previous chapter, this is the normal process of an individual developing their sense of self in relation to others. One of the primary relationships in the differentiation process is separating one's identity from the parent. Assessing one's level of differentiation involves evaluating one's own ability to think and act for oneself in the presence of highly charged emotion. And there is no relationship more emotionally charged than that of parent and child.
As Joe sought to differentiate from his father by trying to do things differently, his father resisted, calling him stupid. In a way, Nick was saying “How dare you not be me.” The reality is that for any successor to step out of the shadows and become a truly authentic and generative leader, he must dare to not be like the predecessor.
Despite his father's swirling negativity, Joe excelled in the pursuit of differentiation. He developed a strong sense of self. In fact, as he created his own definition of success, the family business experienced explosive growth.
Developing a sense of self, such as Joe did, is to understand one's uniqueness. From that comes the self-confidence to believe that our contribution is necessary precisely because it is different. We can contribute something that no one else can. This is critical for the successor in a family business who must differentiate in the presence of the predecessor. Do the same thing (lead the family business), but differently (as only he or she can).
The first challenge of differentiation is attending to the challenges of human development at each of life's cycles as children grow up; this is how the “self” emerges. Life cycle theory1 suggests there are primary tasks a human must accomplish during different stages of his or her development in order to become a fully mature adult. It is believed that failure to accomplish a primary task at any one of these stages will result in behavioral struggles later in life.2 A successor who fails to differentiate has likely struggled to accomplish one or more of these tasks. In many cases, a successor's ability to successfully move through each life cycle, from dependence to independence, is shaped largely by his or her parental influence. Here is a brief overview.3
At this phase, a child's primary task is to develop a sense that he or she is loved and, hence, valuable. When crying is shushed with a feeding, a changed diaper, or a gentle rocking, a child's worth is affirmed. Random (rather than consistent) interaction results in either the child exhibiting little or no expression (he or she has learned that her needs will go unnoticed) or the child crying consistently (he or she will clamor for his or her needs to be met).
This is the stage at which children learn that they have influence over the world. A child, for instance, will break his sister's toy and delight in it; he sees the power he has over the world around him. Because he has not developed a conscience, however, he shows no remorse. In seeing the relationship of their actions to others, children at this stage begin to distinguish themselves from others.
Developing responsibility is the primary task at this stage. The same child will take his sister's toy and begin to show remorse, recognizing his behavior impacts others. Guilt and remorse are the seeds of a growing conscience.
During this stage of the life cycle, children begin to see themselves as competent human beings. They learn they are good at some things that others struggle to master. Problems often surface later in life when parents tell a child he or she is good at something that the child isn't actually good at it.
This is also the stage when children identify gender. A pre-adolescent boy, for instance, will realize he is different from his mother and turn toward his father. It is critical at this stage that the father helps his son understand what it is to be different from mom. And if the father is absent—because he is focusing on the business—it might create a struggle for young boys.
Separation from parents and family begins at this stage. This is when an adult identity and real sense of self begins to form. Rebellion in this stage is often about being “not” mom or “not” dad. It is about preparing for adulthood.
This is the stage at which we begin to explore the world and our place in it. It's about finding the balance between connecting to others, finding meaningful work, and having a sense of separation without being isolated.4 Because a sense of responsibility and commitment is developed, it is at this stage that individuals most typically establish their own families. Tasks not accomplished in earlier stages may negatively show up in one's efforts to marry and create a family. Leaning too much toward intimacy, an individual risks losing herself in another person. The healthy approach is to develop a sense of reciprocal love with another.
Through many years of working with successors in our Next Generation Leadership Institute and other programs at Loyola University Chicago, I have learned that successors and parents who do not adequately attend to the challenges presented at each of the life stages most often get stuck in the shadow and resist the natural process of differentiation. If a successor, for instance, fails to develop a sense of responsibility, a sense of competency, or a healthy sense of separation from his or her parents, stepping out of the shadows is difficult if not impossible.
Anytime successors are stuck in their role or development, reflecting on whether any of the core tasks of development were missed, and what was happening in their lives at the time, can shed meaning and help the successors get unstuck.
All successors carry a burden. They most always are appraised in relationship to their predecessors and their family. This is called the successor's curse. Failures are often magnified in comparison to the predecessors, and their successes aren't seen as their own. Differentiation is the curse's cure.
To lead the company that his father built from one restaurant to a chain of restaurants to a manufacturing juggernaut, Joe Perrino had to map out his own path to leadership. He had to assert himself—take risks. This requires the pursuit of differentiation, discovering one's true self, and is the foundational work of becoming a generative successor.
Differentiation follows a unique path for each successor, based on a composite of personality, family patterns, biology, generational influences, education, and societal context. Joe's never-back-down personality and tenacity for trying new things chaffed against his father's more conservative personality. These qualities in part were innate and in part shaped by the socioeconomics and time period to which each were born. Unlike his father, Joe grew up on the proverbial field of dreams. America afforded limitless possibilities. And while he heard the stories of his ancestors scraping by through the Depression, he only knew the prosperity on the other side. Business ventures that seemed risky and irresponsible to Nick were necessary and fundamental investments in the future according to Joe. For Joe to lead the way his father had would have been inauthentic, and, possibly, detrimental to the family business. Both Nick and Joe had their own context and time.
As Massimo Ferragamo, successor to Ferragamo USA, pointed out: The danger of thinking that you can be just like your parents is a failure to “understand what your calling is in life, what you should be doing, and how to improve on what has been given to you.” Each successor must undergo a crisis of identity. In this crisis, the emerging leader faces the risk of losing herself in their predecessor's myth. The leader will be forced to confront the impression that he or she is a carbon copy of the predecessor. At this pivotal moment, a successor can choose to step away from the myth and towards his or her authentic self. It is first an internal shift (that demands self-reflection) and then an external shift (that requires experimentation) away from the self that is scripted by the myth.
Successors who shortcut this process are commonly ineffective leaders. They capitulate to external influences as well as the expectations others have of them. They are emotionally immature and manifest behavior more typical of tyrants:
Differentiation can be manifested in small but important ways. When Joe first stepped into a leadership role at the restaurant, he found himself in the kitchen, wearing an apron and hat, tossing pizzas. During the early years, Joe dreamed of expanding the business to include mass production of frozen pizzas. But no one took Joe's ideas seriously. He suffered the successor's curse: “I was the son of the owner … always living in the shadows. People would say, ‘You’d be nothing without your dad. You're riding on your dad's coattails.'” In order to step out of the shadow, Joe realized he had to earn credibility. It began with a small, seemingly insignificant, choice of attire.
One day Joe showed up to work in a shirt and tie. All the old-time managers, as Joe puts it, thought it was a joke. Day after day, Joe donned the shirt and tie, regardless of the sneering. Joe's thought was, “I have to change my image if I'm going to change the whole business.” After about five years, everyone started wearing a uniform—even his dad's old guys started wearing a shirt and tie. This one small step outside his father's shadow changed Joe's image as well as the image of the business. By the time his father passed away, all the old timers had fallen in line with Joe's leadership. And a few years later, the frozen pizza business was starting to scale.
To escape the founder's or predecessor's shadow, a young leader must understand the current reality of the existing business; determine what needs to change; and figure out if he or she is fit for the job. In my experience, those who make a successful transition tend to be reflective. They ask:
There must be alignment between who a successor is and what the business needs. A successor may be good at something, but if he or she is not passionate about it, or if the family business doesn't need it, then succession is difficult for both successor and the family business.
To lead with credibility, successors take the risk to lead as only they can lead. They must develop core convictions and form their own values and vision for their life, all while honestly assessing if they possess what the business needs going forward.
A turning point is when a young leader grasps fully that what allowed the organization to succeed in the past might not help the organization meet the challenges of the future. This is confidence earned through the differentiation process. By doing things the way a parent did or approves of, a successor fails to develop her own sense of what is right.
For successors to become generative leaders, they must downsize their ego—from hero to human. It is hard to do this without meeting the challenges of life cycle development. As they humanize themselves—taking ownership of both the good and bad parts of themselves—they are then equipped to humanize their predecessor. They can integrate their good with the bad and develop empathy for their predecessors' failures and vulnerabilities as well as their own. This doesn't mean they ignore their predecessors' successes, but they contextualize those successes.
Although parents don't set out to be their child's hero, they can fall into the trap of accepting the role of hero. What parent doesn't want to be known as a person of conviction, perseverance, courage, sacrifice, and compassion? It is instinctive to want to be recognized by the family as the one who made it happen, who made the sacrifice. The problem comes when a parent allows a child to idealize these qualities, sheltering him or her from failure, conflict, and the hard-knocks of life. Allowing hero-making may inhibit the more mundane but critical responsibilities of parenting, such as instilling values into the child. By focusing on values as opposed to passively and tacitly reinforcing the myth, the parent communicates stability to the child. Doing so also provides continuity with the family values that drive the business.
The stories parents use to instruct are particularly compelling because while they are lessons in legend, they are also lessons in life. A story is compelling and instructive when it conveys a value. Bob Vermeer, chairman emeritus, and his sister Mary Andringa, CEO and Chair of the Vermeer Corporation, recall their father openly talking about his failures, like the gravedigger machine that didn't work, or the time they developed a mowing machine before John Deere, but weren't able to get it to market because of distribution rights. A measure of a parent's self-confidence is his or her ability to be honest about the failures and not react to failures with harshness and blame. And every successful family business has many of them. In the process of becoming a differentiated adult, successors must see their parents as more than just the hero. They need to see the parent as human.
A myth of a legendary figure without the raw stories of that person's humanity, flaws, and weaknesses only enlarges the legend while shortening the legacy. If the essence of idealizing is the making of a hero, the task of stepping out of the shadow is the unmaking of a hero. This does not mean diminishing the hero and what he or she has accomplished. Nor does it mean demonizing the hero—making the hero a villain. Rebellion is a fake version of differentiation. It makes the parent all bad, rather than integrating both good and bad. Deconstructing the myth of a hero humanizes the person. It strips back the veneer, revealing his or her mistakes while accepting, learning from, and even forgiving the failures. Coming to grips with the mortality of a parent gives successors a realistic sense of who they are, freeing up emotional energy to be more forgiving of themselves. It also gives them a shot at taking their own path, and the freedom to not emulate the parent.
Heroes can't be followed if there is no humanity to learn from and build on. The task of the successor in a family business is to acknowledge the legend while continuing to build the legacy in a way that the legendary figure might have never envisioned—but in a way that bears the imprint of the successor.
But to do this, the successor must “leave home,” the very place where the shadow is greatest. In leaving, a child gains the necessary distance from the idealized hero. After a stint in the “real world,” such as Massimo Ferragamo's travels to America, a child can return to see his or her parent-hero in a different light. Rather than following an appointed path, a script for life with predictable steps, a child who goes off-script creates experiences that will help to define an identity apart from the myth. This is the task of recognizing who you aspire to be in light of who your parents are or were: their successes, what they did for you, what they passed on to you, and what they challenged you to reach for. But it also means realizing who you are in light of your own gifts, skills, and passion. A child who finds his or her own sense of calling is better able to resist the pull into the predecessor's shadow.
I liken it to body building. The best way to tone your body is by pushing against something, allowing resistance to develop strength and definition. So, too, the best way to develop a productive and healthy relationship is to allow for resistance between generations. Resistance is the middle ground between compliance and rebellion. It is the common ground between parent and child, predecessor and successor, on which the business can continue to grow. Part of growing up, and growing into a strong leader, is learning to outgrow the hero complex, moving beyond the mythic ideal of the parent–savior. Both parents (the heroes) and successors (the ones rescued) must learn this.
Succession can be messy because differentiation inevitably causes conflict. As the successor leans into a way of leading that is authentic to him or her, he or she pushes against the predecessor's proven way of leading. Differentiated leaders understand that conflict kicks up emotion that needs to be reconciled with the facts. They are empathetic to others' perspectives and points of view, but they avoid sympathy. Empathy seeks understanding; sympathy wants solidarity. Differentiated leaders don't get sucked in even when they receive negative feedback. They pursue what they feel is in the best interest of the whole, and don't allow negative emotion to sway them. Strong successors are able to step out from the shadows cast by parents and grandparents that are often laden with emotion, entitlement, and expectation: the Silver Spoon Club. Released from the burden, they are free to develop their own identity. They become the hub of family legacy that champions the best of the family values and leverages the strengths of its members. Together, the family generates meaning, purpose, and an emotional return of investment—all the things that money can't buy.
The Bowen Center for the Study of the Family describes this differentiated leader as one who:
This can feel threatening, even disorienting, to a successor. He can act selflessly, but it must be a thoughtful choice, not a response to relationship pressures. Breaking away from the old patterns is a sign that the successor has done the hard work of figuring out what he or she believes—determining what to hold onto to preserve the identity of the business, and what fresh perspective is necessary to lead the business into the next era.
Creating one's own definition of success as distinct from that of one's parents, family, and business community is a primary task of differentiation. What distinguishes successful successors in family businesses is their ability to chart their own course. On a journey to identity formation, signposts mark the way, indicating, “Stop! You're headed in the wrong direction!” or, “Keep going in this direction.” Trials faced through experimentation; overcoming failures; feedback from others; mentors; education: These all provide the successors with feedback that they are headed in the right (or wrong) direction.
The strength to define a unique course of action comes from a clear understanding that we are more than who our parents want us to be. And sometimes, from their point of view, less than they want us to be. While many young leaders focus their actions on making their parents happy, the most successful successors do things differently, despite disapproval from their parents. Identity is formed through differentiation, enabling a successor to achieve internal as well as external credibility. The more he or she aligns her beliefs with her actions, the more credibility he or she experiences. To quote Dave Juday, retired chairman of Ideal Industries, this can help the successor “start with what needs to be done, rather than what has always been done.”
The family mythology often works against this, trapping individuals into roles along with familial versions of success. It's hard to break free from the roles, because underlying the roles is a child's primal wish for parental acceptance and love. The child will tend to give primary consideration to the way parents see him or her, not the way the child sees him- or herself. The task of self-awareness is asking, “How do I see myself?” and, “What does success look like for me?” One can only imagine where Home Run Inn would be today had Joe Perrino bought into his father's assessment that all Joe's ideas were stupid.
Defining self apart from one's parents doesn't happen overnight, but gradually as one differentiates. Determining what's right for the future is largely dependent on the cultivation of self-confidence, wisdom, and knowledge, which I will discuss in chapters to come. These are all necessary to make this break from the parent. Cultivating a gut instinct, identifying his or her passion, knowing his or her strengths and weaknesses, and working toward continual improvement—all lay the foundation for a successor to choose to do things in a way that is authentic to him- or herself.
Unintentionally, successors fail to lead authentically because they fail to differentiate. It is all too easy to assume the larger identity of legendary parents and to allow that to prop up the leader's sense of self. But it's only a crutch. Successors can't build a foundation of credibility on someone else's accomplishments. The foundation of authenticity can only be built from the hard work of establishing a true sense of one's self and one's own accomplishments.
The first draft of the story of a person's life is written by the genes during fetal development. That's nature. Parents help to shape the rough draft, filling in the narrative during childhood. That's nurture. But nature and nurture can only take the story so far. Sooner or later, the individual has to take authorship to develop fully the story's main character—him- or herself.
For all the ways a myth provides meaning and purpose, it rarely helps the successor establish a strong sense of self. The myth a successor grows up with is likely to confuse the issue of identity. One dead end that I have identified (see Chapter 1) is idealization, the process of exaggerating positive qualities in a person. Children naturally idealize their parents, and parents tend to also idealize their children, especially when they confuse loving their children with loving the best of themselves in their children. What parents often want is their own image reflected by their children, not someone who is uniquely different from them. The irony is that it is the child's uniqueness and sense of self that will allow him or her to lead the business with credibility, and consequently further the family legacy.
The natural progression of succession in a family business is that parents foist their expectations on their children. The expectations become the obligations of the child, who works from a sense of duty rather than desire. One successor once said to me regarding his choice to enter the business: “I felt that if I didn't come into the business, I would be letting my father down.”
The process of idealization can also go the way of indulgence, of setting no expectations at all, except for that of happiness, and providing for their children a canvass of unlimited potential and opportunity: “You can do anything. I just want you to be happy.” Both specific expectation and suspended expectation present dilemmas to a successor trying to figure out who he is and what he wants. The one defines the successor by his duty: “I will be the loyal child, the good soldier, and do what's expected.” The other leaves all identity open: “You can do and be anything.” Neither guides children into a growing sense of their own personhood.
The statements, “I am doing what my parents want me to do,” or, “I can do anything I want to do,” leave the successor asking the same question: “What is it that I want to do?” While the temptation might be to see differentiation as solely the challenge of the successor, the parent also plays a powerful role in the process. If the parents work to give the next-generation leaders a true understanding of their strengths and weaknesses, as well as their successes and their failures, this can let light through the shade of the tree.
The inner work of self-awareness can be prompted by intuition, but it must become an intentional process of getting to know what is underneath the surface. It demands figuring out one's own personhood. A successor must compare the story of who he thinks he is with the reality of who he is—and be honest about the gap. Building internal credibility starts with this self-awareness, the inner work that only the leader can see that validates the outer work that everybody else sees.
It's not just turning on the light, but intentionally shining it inward and asking, “What am I not seeing?” as well as, “What am I pretending not to know?” Successors must find the courage to face the most realistic version of who they are. Self-awareness is something that builds and grows across the life cycle. Unfortunately, it can be distorted by the messages of our parents and the shadow. A temptation for Joe Perrino might have been to believe his father's opinion that his ideas were stupid, but he worked hard to differentiate in spite of this. Self-awareness is also a learned characteristic. It develops over time. The process of development ranges from obliviousness (having little or no understanding of one's own emotions), to consciousness (individuals become aware not only of who they are, but who they are in the mind of others). Self-awareness is innate; it is learned; and it must also be applied.
Differentiating oneself from one's parents starts with self-awareness. Self-awareness is the process of building consciousness of “who I really am in the world.” Rather than just implementing a parent's or the family's vision for the successor's future, as a successor becomes self-aware she becomes clear about who she wants to be, what she is passionate about, and what she is good at—who she really is. It's about creating a clear vision of who one wants to be in the world, and reconciling that with who one really is. To be self-aware is to increase one's understanding of what one values, personality, style, the impressions that one leaves on others, what one is good at and, where one needs to improve. Through building self-awareness, a successor can begin to own his own definition of success—one that builds on the best of the family legacy, while charting a course that is true to his or her unique talents and beliefs. This work can be both practical and reflective.
The following describes four practical ways a successor can increase self-awareness:
Reflection is much more introspective, psychological, and nonlinear. These methods require successors to reflect on the knowledge that they have about themselves, as well as the feedback they get from others, and then determine what needs to change in their life because of the information. These reflective methods are often needed to fully integrate the feedback provided by the more practical methods of building self-awareness. Reflective methods include these three:
Building one's sense of identity through self-awareness allows the successor to build both internal and external credibility, which I will explore in subsequent chapters. Along with the discovery of oneself as a unique entity comes the understanding of independence to exert one's will and either adopt, adapt, or discard that which surrounds the leader. For the emerging leader, this is about testing his or her capabilities against reality. For lack of hard data about oneself, an individual will make up a version of self that doesn't necessarily match reality. The more self-aware a successor becomes, the better able the individual is to make an informed assessment of what he or she is capable of.
Bella Hoare is a banker—a career she admits rarely makes any child's “What I Want to Be When I Grow Up” list. Bella is an eleventh-generation managing partner of the family-owned C. Hoare & Co.: “Private bankers since 1672.”5 C. Hoare & Co. is the oldest bank in the United Kingdom, the world's fifth oldest bank, and the most profitable in the country.
According to Bella, she wasn't born to be a banker; she certainly wasn't interested in a banking career. Instead, she grew into it as she worked to become the person she wanted to be. Now, banking is an expression of her personality. “I don't make the distinction between business and my personal values, some of which are different, particularly in the banking world.… I'm a firm believer in having fun. It's one of my core values. There's not a lot of fun in banking.”
Bella developed a sense of fun, in part, from the way her parents raised her. “They never boxed me in,” she says. “If you box people in…then things explode.”
On the one hand, Bella says she was not “really taught anything growing up,” but when she talks about her parents, she reveals their profound influence on her. “I was difficult, awkward, and generally grungy and revolting,” she says, “but my parents never excluded me. My father never made me do anything, but when he said, ‘I suggest,’ I knew it came with the full weight of his parental authority.” He also brought to bear the weight of a father's love. When Bella went away to boarding school, he wrote her every week, “and every letter he told me stories about people in his life, but never about work.” He shared himself as a human more than a hero.
Her father's presence, strong but not dominating, gave Bella freedom to explore what she valued. She was burdened by neither expectations nor idealization. “I didn't grow up,” she says, “being told I was clever or beautiful or anything like that on any sort of regular basis. But I always knew my own mind.” And her own values. As her teacher reported, “We hope that next term Arabella will see homework as more than an intrusion into her valued private life.”
Bella idled through school and then hit the throttle into her career. She followed her half-Russian husband to his half-motherland, learned Russian so she could work for a stock brokerage firm where she was hired as number 2 of 2, and stayed until she was number 2 of 75. All the while, Bella was preparing herself for the job that she didn't want.
Her cousin, Alex Hoare, was managing partner of the bank, and Bella had been a luminary on his radar. For one year he pursued her, and she rebuffed him. “Why should I come to a dozy family firm on Fleet Street?” she says. As it turned out, Alex got his way, and so did Bella.
Bella ascribes to the theory that mistakes are strategic, not chronic. You don't keep making the same ones. “I learned a lot of lessons from the mistakes I made at my two jobs, and none here knows about those mistakes. They can see that I've learned.” Bella has proved herself to the one man who matters the most: her father. “He has seen me make useful comments, understanding the issues, taking the business forward. It's been a process of adjustment, from viewing me as Little Bella, to the person he trusts to hold his company in her hands.”
“Taking it forward” is Bella's life approach. “Your job expands at the rate of your capabilities.” For Bella, that includes opportunities that she has seized and created for herself. These have included taking a course at Harvard, seeing a therapist (“very un-English” she laughs), finding mentors at work, and drawing strength from a community of friends. “You end up reasonably confident,” she says, “that you understand your strengths and weaknesses.” She had a strong sense of self, and continued to build it so that at the peak of her career, her “self” and her work coalesced. “I don't make a distinction between a business life and a personal set of values,” she says. “And some of those values are different.”
Different indeed. Bella Hoare has made banking fun, and that perhaps, is her greatest achievement.
For the young leaders in a family business, self-awareness is a journey that must happen within the context of the family legacy. They are more than sons and daughters; they are stewards of the larger social organism, which the family has produced. The emphasis is not merely on individual success (“What am I going to do with my life?”) but also on the family mission (“What role do I want to play in helping the family achieve its goals?”). It was in this context that Bill Wrigley made his declaration of independence, “I am not my father,” and coupled it with a declaration of differentiation from his father, “I am going to do things differently.” Differentiation is what allows the successor to “honor the past while doing what's best for the future.”
But there is no formula. While Bella worked outside the family business and returned later, others have worked in the business and earned their way to the top, like Joe Perrino. For John Tyson of Tyson Foods, Inc., the process of differentiation is founded on a simple philosophy: “You just work.” John never consciously joined the family business, because he was never away from it. “The only succession here at Tyson Foods,” says John, “would be those who worked hard and got a chance to do more.” John got his chance at 13, working at just about every job that Tyson had, under the tutelage of many of its employees. One experience in particular shaped his understanding of the company, his place in it, and the way he would run it when he became CEO. At 16, he was assigned one of the simpler jobs at the plant, taking chicken crates full of chickens off the upper conveyor belt on the truck and putting them on a lower conveyor belt. The manager showed him how to do it, but John wasn't paying attention. On his first chicken-crate transfer, wet chicken litter sprayed his face.
“What do I do now?” John asked.
“You just stay here and work. I'm going back to the office.”
The manager came back at lunch with a new pair of jeans and a T-shirt that he had purchased at the local dry goods store. “He knew I wasn't paying attention,” says John, “and that I was going to get broadsided with chicken s—t. And he knew that he was going have to buy me a change of clothes. He was paying attention to the details, and he took care of me because I was his employee.”
Caring for his employees became one of John Tyson's core values, which he learned not just from his father but from the workers at Tyson. The greatest differentiator for John was both the variety of jobs that he did and the diversity of people for whom he did them: “They all contribute to the mosaic of who I am today.”
Successors find out who they are as they interact with others, become aware of their strengths, work, gain feedback, pick themselves up after failure, experiment with leadership, and push against the established way of doing things, which I will discuss in the chapters to come. Every successor does it differently, and at different times in their lives. Bella kicked against the system from the moment she was born, furiously defying who she wasn't. She began the positive work of differentiation when she resisted the pull of the family business and found her own career path, along with “the really good fun of succeeding because you've worked hard.” For some leaders, like Bill Wrigley Jr., stepping out of the shadow comes years after unsuccessfully emulating the successor. Other leaders, like Joe Perrino, challenge the successor's business practices prior to taking on the mantle of leadership.
Being born into a myth that provides meaning and purpose is the beneficence of nature. And it is followed by all the nurture of blessings that an iconic family enterprise bestows on the successor. But a successor will only find self-fulfillment in the organization when he figures out what he can uniquely contribute to the ongoing legacy. Differentiation starts this process, and value formation continues it.
Perhaps that is one of the most important markers that signals an emerging leader will be successful—he or she changes a value or emphasizes a value over another. She doesn't merely parrot the values of the predecessor. The leader brings unique convictions to bear on the family business. Values are the core principles, the inner convictions that leaders aspire to live by and that guide behavior. A leader's actions are either in alignment with her values or they aren't. A leader who has stepped out of the shadows will risk the consequences of becoming aligned with his values, even when that means change for the family business.
Joe Perrino stepped out of the shadows by challenging his father's conservative approach to business, even if it led to disapproval. “I challenged [my father] on anything that he'd say. I would ask him, ‘Why do we have to do it that way?’ And he would get real upset.” Just as Nick wished Joe would quiet his crazy ideas, so Joe wished his father would have been “open-minded and progressive—because they could have been so much more.” To lead in lockstep with his father would have been inauthentic to Joe. By nature, Joe was a competitor, not a survivor. “You have to want to compete,” he says, “and you have to want to be the best.” So Joe did things his dad would never do, like automating the first frozen pizza plant, joining a presidents' forum to network, and meeting with competitors to open the door to future opportunities.
Aligning his actions with his values—that's how Joe went from “a stupid kid that rode on his daddy's coattails” to the Home Run king.
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