Customer Reviews

Centuries of Success: Lessons from the World's Most Enduring Family Business

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Dr. O'Hara's penetrating and readable book opens an inviting door to the nuances of family businesses throughout history. The reader is entertained and informed about how family members influence - for good and bad - the changing fortunes of a plethora of enterprises in Italy, France, Japan, or South Africa, to name just a few of the countries the author visited for sit-down discussions with family elders as well as heirs. The eminent former president of a prestigious business college, Dr. O'Hara easily balances an array of family issues and elicits some remarkably candid observations from his sources - especially the younger generation. Invaluable, too, is his concluding identification of eleven recurring principles and practices that seem to visit global family businesses

Rather than interviewing one scion about building a single family business, author William T. O'Hara profiles 20 of the world's oldest - at least two centuries - family-held businesses, representing a combined 8,911 years of experience. O'Hara uses profiles of these companies and their leaders to explain how these family businesses survived when so many others failed. Generally, only about a third of family firms survive the transition from the founding generation to the second wave, and the mortality rate worsens over time. Given the global reach of these businesses and their extraordinary longevity, O'Hara offers unique information. The drawbacks are slight: sometimes the book reads too much like an anecdotal travelogue and occasionally it surrenders to generalities about family businesses, though that may have been unavoidable. These quibbles aside, we strongly recommend this book for anyone seeking insights into how families work together, stay together and profit together, generation after generation.

Picked up this name from a Entrepreneurship textbook bought locally, and have been picking some of the stories, and they are well written. I fully recommend it as a research book.