Customer Reviews

Unconventional Wisdom: CounterintuitiveInsightsfor Family Business Success (IMD Executive Development Series)

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This brief book is the product of an academic collaboration but its professorial essays are mercifully clear and free of academic jargon. This collection, edited by John Ward, explores the performance, management and governance issues that matter most to family businesses. The title refers to the fact that family-owned companies are unconventional, at least in comparison to publicly owned businesses and, therefore, they need a distinctive management approach. Family businesses derive competitive advantage from precisely those practices that conventional managers abhor - such as nepotism. We recommend this book to anyone engaged in a family business, and certainly to other academics studying this subject.

Similar to using an opponent's strength against him, as in martial arts, Unconventional Wisdom shows business families how they can turn a negative into a positive. Or think of it like this: what used to be considered a negative has been discovered to be a positive. Nepotism is not a bad thing, for example, using nepotism positively awards the business with a loyal, passionate, dedicated employee.
Other examples abound in this fine book, like how family business frugality is a positive. Long range planning can better be done by families with a multi-generational viewpoint.
Perhaps soon there will be university courses for NON-family business people to learn from the world's leading family businesses. As referenced within Unconventional Wisdom, the family controlled businesses in the S&P 500 were found to be more valuable and more profitable than the non-family controlled businesses.
And that quotation you always see about how few family businesses make it into the fourth generation? It does not apply to the modern world: if you are the second or third generation in a family business, you have nothing to worry about as long as you build upon the STRENGTHS inherent in family businesses.