Family businesses claim superiority due to their long-term orientation. Nowhere is this more evident than their treatment of people
On a cold, rainy February night, I connected through New York’s La Guardia Airport. The plane stopped short of the gate, and the passengers walked down steps to the tarmac to collect our gate-checked bags and walk about 200 metres in the rain to the terminal. This is the airport for America’s greatest city, I thought, yet it is clearly suffering from neglect.
Family business should not be confused with small business in the US
Size matters in the US, which is home to some of the world’s biggest family businesses. The country’s five largest family-controlled firms – Walmart, Ford, Cargill, Koch Industries and Comcast – had combined revenues of $911.9 billion (€694.8 billion) in 2012, more than Indonesia’s GDP.
Outdoor retailer L.L. Bean has announced Shawn Gorman – great-grandson of the family business’s founder – as its new chairman, in the culmination of a leadership transition initiated by Gorman’s uncle Leon two years ago.
Outdoor retailer L.L. Bean has announced Shawn Gorman – great-grandson of the family business’s founder – as its new chairman, in the culmination of a leadership transition initiated by Gorman’s uncle Leon two years ago.
Money is key for American family business owners, while their Finnish counterparts value time and tend to stick to what they know best.
Money is key for American family business owners, while their Finnish counterparts value time and tend to stick to what they know best.
That’s according to a new doctoral thesis, Construction of the Entrepreneurial Identity in the Family Business Context, which found big difference in how Finnish family business owners and their US counterparts see themselves and their entrepreneurial identities.
