ESCP Europe

24 activities to plan your family and business future Does your family own a business? Does your family control significant financial or business assets? Is family harmony an important goal for you and your business family? Have family issues or conflict spilled over into your family business? Have business decisions impacted your family? Do you advise wealthy or business families? Would you like to support your family business clients' planning activities more effectively? Answer yes to any of these and this book is for you! This activity-based fieldbook is designed as a rigorous planning tool based on more than 25 years of teaching and advising business families around the world. It teaches the professional planning skills required for any business family to move from the founder or owner-manager stages (G1,G2), based on power, personality and politics, to a multi-generational family-team model (G3 and beyond), driven by planning, passion and purpose. We call it a fieldbook because it creates real-world family learning experiences with activities to explore family and business planning. After over 25 years of teaching family businesses around the world, we have seen some outstanding business families who understand and use professional planning tools to help their families and businesses perform better. But we have also observed, and research shows, that most business families do not have plans for succession and few have a clear family strategy. The need for business planning is demonstrated and accepted but many families still neglect addressing their family plans because they know the issues are emotional and they do not want to risk potentially explosive conversations.