Customer Reviews

Succeeding Generations: Realizing the Dream of Families in Business

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Ivan Lansberg's new book is an excellent resource for anyone living through, or helping to manage, the succession process in a family business! The book is thoroughly scholarly yet practical...it is "a must read," for anyone interested in the subject. It is the best book on the subject I have read!

Ivan Lansberg is among the top thinkers in the Family Business field. In this book, drawing on his experience as a consultant, and also on his work as co-author of Generation to Generation, he sums up all there is to say about the complex family/business relationship. A must for anyone interested in the subject.

Succeeding Generations takes the family business where few dare to venture: into the perilous landscape of succession - the boneyard of many a family enterprise felled by dissension, sibling rivalry, and greed. Ivan Lansberg, co-founder of the Family Firm Institute and your guide through this treacherous terrain, neatly straddles the worlds of academic rigor and real-world experience as he shows you how to pave the way for the generation to come. Case studies of well-known family businesses illustrate Lansberg's observations and bring his advice home. We from getAbstract recommend this book to anyone involved in the complex concern of family business.

This is the second book I have read on the subject after Ward's "Perpetuating the Family Business". It is very good. There is a tendency with "how to" books to oversell the ease or applicability of their solution. This is not the case with Lansberg, and that makes it especially good.

The fact is, many company founders are self absorbed, narcissistic, and cling onto power as if it's the only thing they have in life (which for a lot of them is true). It is natural for these sorts of people to avoid assessing their own mental abilities in the context of aging realistically.

If you are in the position of being a child of one of these people, you may have an insoluble problem on your hands if you think your future consists of inheriting the business and fixing all the things that will no doubt be wrong with it if your parent is one of these types of company founders, no matter how brilliant you are.

I have yet to see a book targeted at this demographic, but at least this book points out fairly numerous examples of where this scenario ends in tragedy and unhappiness. There can be a large time interval between incompetence through the start of dementia until death.

For you to successfully take over the business, the owner must not have destroyed it through incompetence. This is quite an achievement, considering that changing market circumstances may require drastic action that is viewed as rash by the no-longer competent founder. Consider also that the controlling owner will be a target of swarms of con artists including those who would sell shares in failed businesses, some company managers, and banks, who would of course never make predictions that would allow them to make more money at the expense of your business.

If the business is not destroyed through incompetence, do you have any written and witnessed evidence that it will actually be willed to you? Consider that you will naturally have the best interest of the business at heart, and oppose its downward slide. You will probably be the lone voice in a wilderness of crooks, and it will place you at odds with your parent, a parent who probably is not in the habit of listening to anyone unless they agree with him, least of all someone he remembers looking at from above a change table.

If you are to be heard, be prepared for some very heated arguments. The insult of you being right will be added to the injury of the argument. Cumulatively, this may be enough to get you disinherited.

If somehow you made it over those two hurdles, what chance is there that a demented father is going to be willing or capable of best practice succession planning? You may be placed in a position where you are not able to outvote selfish, untrustworthy and or incompetent siblings, or your inheritance may be held in trust (and are they actually trustworthy or interested in growing the business like you are)?

These are real, significant risks, and you would be wise to consider them so that you are not blinded by the lure of wealth that the controlling owner is happy to promise. For that reason, chapter 11, "Letting Go", alone is worth the cover price. Aside from Ward, this is the only book on family business succession planning I have read. However, he is correct in saying that Ward, although mostly realistic, is overly optimistic (on page 96). If he is also correct in saying that other authors are even more optimistic, then this is definitely the book to read first if you want to save yourself some pain and heartache.

The rest of the book is a good treatment of family business succession planning.

More than anything, this book provides an applicable framework to deal with the great majority of succession scenarios in family businesses. I think the author's personal experience helps in providing real examples and makes the running example thougought the book believable. The most important contribution is the idea that there must be a separation of the emotional aspects from the business aspects and that all persons involved should have the maturity to understand and expect that that is the best way to deal with succession in family businesses.