I learned a lot this week from the reading for the “You be the Consultant” activity. The situation presented was interesting: a company’s founder was planning on retiring in a few years, and his three children all worked at the company. He had to determine in which child’s hands he should leave the leadership of the company. The complexity of the issue was that his favorite pick, and possibly the best-qualified candidate, was the youngest of the three children. While we don’t live in an age where primogeniture is the law of the land, but the idea of skipping over the oldest children in favor of the youngest seems unusual even still. What I learned from this reading is that when you are dealing with a family business, it is absolutely critical that maintaining an open line of communication stays at the top of the priority list. Businesses fail all the time; people can get a new job and move on. Families are much more important, and it’s essential that effort be made to maintain the integrity of the family relationships during stressful times such as succession planning and inheritance planning. In fact, doing this reading made me question whether I’d even want to go into business with family members at all—it seems like there is the potential for an extraordinary level of stress and a high potential for hurt feelings, and I’d be more comfortable focusing on maintaining those eternal bonds than running a company together.
$100 Challenge Update
There's not much to report this week on the $100 Challenge Update other than that I am working on putting together my presentation.
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