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One of our favorite books by Patrick Lencioni is “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.” (If you haven’t read it, we highly recommend it.) He’s also the author of an article in the Harvard Business Review about corporate values.  In this article, Lencioni asks readers if four values — communication, respect, integrity and excellence —resemble their own companies’ values and then drops a bombshell: These are the values of Enron, the energy company that declared bankruptcy after committing one of the biggest accounting frauds of this century.  Not surprisingly, there’s

Stepping out of and into business ownership are huge career and life transitions. Owners stepping out have reached a high level of competency and need to transfer the knowledge of what they do and how they do it to their successors. Organizing that transfer is just one reason we include a Transition Timeline™ in the Transition Roadmap documents we create for owners and their successors.  Business owners, however, don’t just step out of ownership; they also step into the next great adventure of their lives. And that transition from business

As Transition Strategists, we talk frequently about hats; primarily knowing when to wear them and which one to wear.  No, we’re not teaching proper hat etiquette. Instead, we use hats as a metaphor for the roles individuals play in a family and in a family business.  Two Hats  Owners / parents wear at least two hats: parent and owner. An owner’s adult child also has at least two: child and successor or non-successor. The trick is knowing when to put on each hat and shelve the other.  Once owners and

It may be natural to talk about the family business—whether long before or during a transition—when family members gather for holidays, but is it smart?  When families, family business, and the holidays converge, it’s natural and convenient to talk about business because, well, everyone is present in person. Having business-related conversations in person—especially those that relate even tangentially to a one-day transition from one generation to the next— is far more effective than video or audio calls, texts, voice messages, or emails.  In-Person Interaction  From life experience we know that

The role Transition Guides play in family business transitions is critical because their experience, insight, and use of a proven transition process greatly increases the odds of transition success. And, as the frequently quoted statistics indicate, success in family business transitions is not guaranteed or easy.   Success in family business transitions means different things to different people, so please allow us to share our definition.  For a family business transition to be successful:  That’s a high bar to clear, but 100% of the owners who have completed our process (The

In our article “Creating a Business Transition in a Volatile World,” we focused on two words—volatility and plan—to try to shift a common mindset that causes owners to put off transitioning their companies to successors. Let’s dive deeper into that discussion by focusing on the consequences of a decision to delay due to a fear of volatility and a strategy that helps owners embrace—rather than fear—volatility.  A Tale of Two Owners  Chris and Lee are two fictional owners. Their boats are metaphors for their businesses, their passengers for their successors,

We frequently meet business owners who are hesitant to make a plan to transition their businesses to successors—often their adult children—during today’s volatile times. If volatility has put your transition on pause, we’d like to help change your mindset by focusing on just two words: volatility and plan.  Volatility  According to Merriam-Webster, the word volatile means: characterized by or subject to rapid or unexpected change. We see the word used a lot lately to describe the financial markets, wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, and national politics, to name

The transition of family businesses from Generation 1 to Generation 2 are complex, yet complexity increases exponentially in transitions from Generation 2 to Generation 3 and beyond. In this article we look at (1) the reasons for the complexity and (2) four building blocks of sustainable family business transitions.  Families: They’re Complicated!  Transitions from Gen. 1 to Gen. 2 typically involve parents and children in one family unit. This family could be blended (meaning it includes children from prior marriages), and that only some children might want to participate in