Generational changeover in companies from the perspective of emotions<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Conceiving, creating and managing a business is also a question of humanity and of emotions. Many entrepreneurs and managers are well aware of this. So too are those who have to face generational changeover at a certain point in their career. Managing emotions and accounts can then become a further exercise in which to prove one\u2019s production culture. Mariano De Vincenzo and Rossella Torretta tackle precisely this question of generational changeover triggered when a company\u2019s founder passes away in their article \u201cEmozioni e passaggio generazionale nelle piccole e medie imprese\u201d (Emotions and generational changeover in SMEs).<\/p>\n The investigation takes a specific (real) case as its starting point, proceeding to frame the topic more generally. An intervention to promote generational changeover in an SME\u00a0\u2013 explain the authors\u00a0\u2013 becomes a point of departure for addressing generational transition also from the perspective of emotions, which are not entirely irrelevant when you\u2019re talking about production, organisational dimension, budgets, management problems and procedures.<\/p>\n But what happened? On the death of the founder, the heirs were locked in a sort of managerial paralysis in which the eldest son had assumed the role of heir by primogeniture, maintaining the structure that was organised top-down by the father-founder and actually asking the consultants to make his siblings and all the employees accept him in that rule, thus delegating his own authorisation to occupy the position to third parties. De Vincenzo and Torretta obtain a more general profile from this situation.<\/p>\n The fundamental term is \u2018time\u2019. The death of a founder poses the problem of time in processing the transmission and acquisition of the inheritance and its transformation is an inescapable part of the transition. Time is essential for coming to terms with the loss of the father-founder and, with him, letting go of self-idealisations and encountering reality. Maintaining an unchanged organisation, moving one man to the place of another, proves merely to be a strategy introduced to avoid facing pain and change. It\u2019s a cultural and human process before being a management one, a process that can\u2019t be followed without expert assistance. Successfully identifying the right path and rethinking the organisation and the position of those who come afterwards in the company are steps that can\u2019t be automatic or swift.<\/p>\n To describe all this, De Vincenzo and Torretta first analyse the characteristics of the two main entities at play (family and business) then proceed to delve into specific aspects such as suffering, the history of the business used as a case study itself, the \u201cactors\u201d involved, the particular figure of the founder, the central issue of the generational transition and hence inheritance, and finally the path taken to face and manage it.<\/p>\n Mariano De Vincenzo and Rossella Torretta\u2019s article is by no means an easy read, but reading it is nonetheless important.<\/p>