The Family Strategy - How Families Secure Their Business Across Generations
Kirsten Baus
Springer 2025
For a long time, family businesses were considered a discontinued model. In the meantime, their advantages are on everyone's lips again: flat hierarchies, short decision-making paths, personnel continuity, reliability and, last but not least, a strong corporate identity. German family businesses are also well positioned in terms of corporate strategy. What they lack is a family strategy. Owner-managed companies fail more often due to conflicts in the family than in the market: managing partners fall out over each other, tribes wage trench warfare, succession arrangements are blocked – in the end, nothing works anymore. The consequences range from frictions in day-to-day business to existential crises.
This book examines the typical causes of conflict and shows how they are brought under control in family strategy through the development of family governance. The family strategy creates stabilising structures in the family, such as the Family Charter and the Family Meeting, which ensure constructive interaction between family, shareholders and the company. With their help, founders, sibling partnerships and family dynasties are enabled to shape and control their company on the basis of common values and goals.
For the 7th German edition, the book has been revised and brought up to date.