Book Pic: Managing for the Long Run

by Gale Martin, Director of Marketing & Member Relations at the S. Dale High Center for Family Business

In most of the literature reviewing best business practices, researchers agree that family businesses have been long ignored. If not for the egregrious practices of publicly held corporations headlining the nightly news of late--massaging numbers to earn annual bonuses, allowing core competencies and competitive advantage to atrophy in favor of short term gains--family businesses might've continued to be discounted. Not surprising that they would be overlooked, until you look closely at other data such as:

• Family-held businesses account for half the employment in the United States
• Family-held businesses account for 78% of new jobs created
• Family-held businesses make up 35-40 percent of Fortune 500 and S&P 500 companies

In a 2005 publication called Managing in the Long Run, Danny Miller and Isabelle Le Breton-Miller, both affiliated with the University of Alberta, looked to family businesses to illumine best business practices. That's right. Selected family businesses were exemplary in their business practices. Their carefully researched book reveals that  family-held businesses did a better job in the long run of sustaining success. Managing in the Long Run seeks to explore why this is so.

The family held firms analyzed in Managing for the Long Run all demonstrated what the authors called The Four C Qualities:  connection, command, continuity, and community.

Because this book offers real lesssons to family businesses such as 1) how to configure and shape your "C" qualities to support strategy; 2) how to troubleshoot problems; and 3) how every manager can build on these findings, the Gen Next Affinity Group at the S. Dale High Center has selected this book as their 2010 read and will report their exploration here on High Ground in several installments.

Look for the first detailed review of initial chapters of Managing in the Long Run in April.