With families dedicated to their businesses and businesses drawing their lifeblood for growth from their families, one thing is certain: the bond between a business and its leader can be as strong as the one between that leader\u2019s family and the business they created. But things don\u2019t always go as hoped. Being a family that created a business is not the same as being a good business family, and it\u2019s important to understand why that is, particularly in the complex world in which we now live. Nowadays, the already delicate balance between the bond of a business family and the business itself can be thrown off even more easily than in the past.<\/p>\n
\u201cExamining relationships among family influence, family culture, flexible planning systems, innovativeness and firm performance<\/strong>\u201d, a study conducted by three US universities (Northeastern University in Boston, University of Mississippi in Oxford, and the University of Louisville), has sought to shed some light on how a business and its family intertwine.<\/p>\n The stated goal of the three researchers, Justin B. Craig<\/strong>, Clay Dibrell<\/strong> and Robert Garrett<\/strong>, was to study the influences family business culture and business management have on each other. More specifically, the three sought to \u201cdraw on the resource-based view of the firm\u201d to understand the influence that the family, family business culture and flexible planning systems as drivers of innovation have on firm performance.<\/p>\n To conduct the study, questionnaires were given to small and mid-sized family businesses. The key point to come out of the work (published in the Journal of Family Business Strategy this November) was that the existence of a good culture of enterprise within the family positively influences firm performance and, in particular, its flexibility in operations and its ability to innovate, but the success of a business comes out of an often fragile, unfathomable sort of chemistry, a combination of culture and background, of intuition and calculation, that is difficult to replicate and entirely unsuited to being captured by simple models.<\/p> Examining relationships among family influence, family culture, flexible planning systems, innovativeness and firm performance<\/strong><\/p>\n Justin B. Craig, Clay Dibrell, Robert Garrett<\/p>\n Journal of Family Business Strategy, November 2013<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" With families dedicated to their businesses and businesses drawing their lifeblood for growth from their families, one thing is certain: the bond between a business and its leader can be as strong as the one between that leader\u2019s family and the business they created. But things don\u2019t always go as hoped. Being a family that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56,57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corporate-culture","category-insights"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n