1.
Decode Your Family Business
Who cut down Mom’s rosebushes? Rosebushes! This fight nearly derailed a successful second-generation family business. We had scheduled a meeting with the company’s owners to discuss whether to retain their under-performing nonfamily CEO. Instead they spent almost the entire time arguing over whether one of the brothers had the right to “prune” or “kill” (depending on whose version you believed) their mother’s prized rosebushes at the family cottage. Despite our efforts to change the subject, they couldn’t move past the rosebush incident. The meeting ended in a deadlock, the group unable to make any decisions together.
It’s hard to imagine a public company’s board coming to a standstill over landscaping. Outsiders ...
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