Reconciling Relationships and Preserving the Family Business

Book excerpt: Learn how to keep family problems from affecting the family business! Reconciling Relationships and Preserving the Family Business: Tools for Success presents a comprehensive model for reconciling fractured relationships within the business-owning family. Studies show that more than two-thirds of family-owned businesses don't survive past the first generationand more than 90 percent of all business enterprises in the United States are owned by families. Written by the founders of the Carmel Institute for Family Business, this unique book is an essential tool for people involved in family businesses, where personal issues can mix with financial interdependencies and work grievances to cause professional failures independent of bad management, market conditions, or financial constraints. Reconciling Relationships and Preserving the Family Business is a practical and concise guide to building healthy families and collaborative family business teams that last for generations. The book introduces the ideology that frames the Reconciliation Model for relationship repair, and defines two main systemic problems facing business-owning families: oppression and disengagement. It also presents an in-depth study of a business-owning family, demonstrating how the Reconciliation Model worksstep-by-step. Reconciling Relationships and Preserving the Family Business addresses, including: basic principles of relationships in business-owning families individual dynamics that account for human dilemmas power issues effective intervention in troubled relationships assessing relationship patterns family structure and process roles, responsibilities, and ethics of advisors working with family-owned businesses and much more! Reconciling Relationships and Preserving the Family Business is a vital resource for members of business-owning families and for the professional people who advise them: lawyers, therapists, bankers, clinical social workers, accountants, consultants, and therapists. The book is invaluable for teaching you to recognize real or potential relational problems that can have an adverse effect on the family business.