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Family Business Rules of the Game:
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Family Business Rules of the Game:
The confidentiality, emotions and secrecy which surround the dealing with the planning of continuation in most businesses, causes such businesses to try to invent the wheel again, and deprives them of benefiting from the experience which has accumulated in other businesses. Even if a good solution exists in a particular business, it is not customary to publicize this, and enable another business to learn from their experience or from the mistakes of others.
Lately businesses and families are devoting great efforts to constructing solutions based on cooperation between the family generations and outside of it. Solutions of cooperation make it possible for all the factors to try to outline a path together.
For the first time in their lives family members who are connected directly or indirectly to a business are being allowed to express their wishes , hopes and aspirations, and to try to combine them with the network of expectations and hopes of their relatives, while adjusting the expectations to the practical economic ability of the family - the family property.
For the first time in their lives members of the younger generation are being allowed to become involved in drawing up the rules of the game, in accordance with which they will be playing in the future.
The drawing up of the rules of the game is extremely important, because any game in which the rules are not known in advance can be expected to create arguments amongst the participants in regard to the way in which it begins, its course and its termination.
The combining of businesses and family is very definitely a game, a game of great importance, where the players taking part in it are the family members of the partners. To whatever extent the players can be made aware of the rules as far in advance as possible, will work out for the good of the business and the family.
It must be remembered that in the early stages of the business activity, when the network of relationships between the partners and the families is good, it is easy to determine agreements. Laying down the same rules at a stage in which any kind of dispute has been created between the parties, can be as difficult as crossing the Red Sea.
In most of the families and businesses that have taken their affairs to Court, we see that over the course of the years, one man in the organization outlined the rules of the game, and nobody dared to challenge his decisions.
When the founder retired, a situation of lack of clarity was created - it wasn't clear who lays down the rules, when and how.
In the event that owners of the organization did not succeed in developing agreed rules of the game in advance, severe disputes can be expected in the set-up. In a set-up without any clear game rules, the members of the organization live in uncertainty, which induces them to carry out actions which they believe will ensure their rights and status. This is the state in which the cold legal system collides with the network of emotions and expectations of the family, a system which, for somebody who is not experienced in family businesses, appears to be irrational.
Experience in the field shows that there is a great deal of room for practical solutions.
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