Books 

FAMILY ENTERPRISE IN THE ASIA PACIFIC: Exploring Transgenerational Entrepreneurship in Family Firms

Edited by Kevin Au, Justin B. Craig and K. Ramachandran (2011) Edward Elgar Publishing.

Download the Family Enterprise in the Asia Pacific flyer

Synopsis:

This book analyses the findings reported in the first Asia Pacific summit of the Successful Transgenerational Entrepreneurship Practices (STEP) project. Researchers in Australia, China, and India discussed eleven in-depth case studies to shed light on the challenges that business families and family businesses faced in continuing and extending their entrepreneurial capabilities across multiple generations.

Based on a common research framework from STEP, each chapter introduces key findings and challenges existing theory, offering answers to two broad questions in the Asia Pacific context: How do business families and family businesses generate and sustain entrepreneurial performance across generations and how does entrepreneurial performance relate to the continuity, growth and transgenerational entrepreneurship of business families and family businesses? In doing so, the authors look at key issues faced by family business including dealing with communication issues across generations, resolving conflict between siblings, preparing and luring younger generations back to family business, and professionalisation of business. The chapters go beyond the succession and governance challenges and explore the processes and outcomes of entrepreneurship in the Austral–Asian family context.

Academics, teachers and students in business and management, entrepreneurship and family business, and Asian studies will find this path-breaking book of great value, as will libraries, policymakers and consultants.
 

UNDERSTANDING FAMILY ENTERPRISE: A Book of Readings

by Ken Moores & Justin B. Craig (2011) Bond University Press.

Synopsis:

This collection of papers highlights the diversity in family business scholarship. The purpose of the collection is primarily to chronicle the distinctive learning experiences of Australian Centre for Family Business researchers rather than be a comprehensive coverage of all aspects of family enterprises.

The papers are presented within a structure that represents a framework that has emerged from our work over the years. This framework is the basis of our understanding the why, the what, and the how by which family firms can achieve a distinct advantage over more widely‐held companies.

Specifically, these features that differentiate family controlled businesses (FCBs) from non‐family businesses (NFBs) are discussed in terms of their Architecture (strategy inspired structures and systems), their Governance (Family and Business), their Entrepreneurship (Leadership and Strategy), and their Stewardship (Individual and Family).

Women in Family Business Leadership Roles: Daughters on the Stage

by Ken Moores and Mary Barrett  (2009) Edward Elgar Publishing, UK.

Download the Women in Family Business Leadership Roles Flyer [PDF223 Kb]

Synopsis:

First, the book fills a gap in the market where there are simply no recent books on women in family business. Second, it combines two areas which are receiving increasing attention in the academic and popular business literature, but which have not been considered jointly before. The first area is women’s entrepreneurship. Previous studies of women business owners and leaders, and public policy approaches to encouraging women to start their own firms, have tended to pre-judge likely success factors such as management styles or approaches to leadership and entrepreneurship, in terms of how these differ from male approaches. Our own previous book on learning family business: Learning family business: Paradoxes and pathways (Ashgate, 2002) might be seen as encouraging this approach, since it focussed mainly on male family business leaders. The present book, by contrast, grounds findings about leadership and entrepreneurship in women entrepreneurs’ experiences.

The second area is an important but neglected context for women’s entrepreneurship: family business. It is known that family businesses serve as incubators for the next generation’s learning about wealth creation. However, women have only recently started to be routinely considered for leadership roles in family firms. Rather than taking a ‘men v. women’ approach, this book investigates how leadership, entrepreneurship and family business can be understood in the context of women’s experiences.

The book is based on case studies of 13 women and their family firms, drawn from English-speaking and non-English speaking countries. The women leaders display a range of different types of involvement with their family firms, from CEOs of firms which are family firms ‘by intent’, to second or later generation female successors to formal leadership or other influential roles in firms started by male or female forebears. The cases include examples of women who, in their own estimation, have not reached a position of leadership as well as those who have attained this.

Reviews

"It is engrossing, rich with description and alive with characters, and most importantly: its message lingers after your reading is done.”

 “...it is a treat when a book compels you to reread because the first time you were so distracted by the story it told that you read purely for pleasure...”

 “Professors Mary Barrett and Ken Moores are scholars with a significant track record in the area of family business scholarship, and as such this is not their first book on the topic. In this particular volume their focus is on the way in which women experience leadership roles in family businesses, and their passion for this topic is evident throughout the book.”

 “This skilful brevity, yet also density of coverage is possibly achievable only by authors with total mastery of their area of expertise, and significant experience in distilling and communicating its essence.”

 “...the book is undoubtedly a significant contribution to the body of knowledge on female entrepreneurship generally, and on women’s leadership in family businesses specifically.”

 “It should be a “desk set” choice for anybody interested in advancing their own understanding, or the understanding of others, about female entrepreneurship in the family business context.”
 

Learning Family Business: Paradoxes and Pathways

by Ken Moores and Mary Barrett (2003) Ashgate Publishing Limited, UK.

Synopsis:
This book, like many other projects, grew from a starting point that was much smaller than the outcome might suggest. We have long been interested in what makes family businesses tick, the stages of their development and in how their CEOs had learned the skills to manage them and make them grow. And many family firms have indeed grown, often well beyond the vision of their founders and well beyond the category of ‘small business’ which is so often – and wrongly – brought to many people’s minds when they hear the term ‘family business’.

We have researched these issues in a variety of ways over the years, from mail surveys of senior managers in family firms to formal interviews with firm members to in-depth case studies of particular firms involving a multitude of measurements and other ways of scrutinizing firm and industry variables. Among all these approaches, we have given special weight to the ideas of family firm members themselves, many of whom have had considerable experience in businesses other than their own. In their efforts to compare their business with others we have heard one phrase recur dozens if not hundreds of times: ‘It’s just like any other business, except…’. This phrase would invariably be followed by a description of something that marked family businesses as truly different from others, whether it involved the culture and values of the firm, how its leaders set goals for the firm and monitored progress towards them, how and where it was felt business experience was to be gained, how leadership succession was to be managed and a multitude of other things.

We are not the first to acknowledge that there are issues for family businesses that make them worthy of consideration as a special business category. In this book we have tried to explain the ways the ‘different’, even paradoxical, nature of family businesses affects how their aspiring leaders set out to learn how to manage them and the strategic choices they make in the process of trying to ensure their firms survive and grow. Along with Charles Handy who, in The Empty Raincoat, pointed out how all management is increasingly paradoxical, we have tried to see how recognising and thus ‘framing’ the paradoxes of family business which appear at various stages of both learning family firms can help in exploring, understanding and, perhaps, managing them.

The term ‘management’ here is deliberately modest. We have not been in search of ‘solutions’ or ‘quick fixes’ to the paradoxes, since this would suggest that they can be made to disappear. Rather we have explored how the experiences of incumbent CEOs of family firms and the strategic choices they have made during the development of the firm, as evidenced by the stage the firm has reached in the business life cycle, provide some broad profiles and pathways consistent with family firm survival and growth.

It seems that family firms do indeed differ from non-family firms, but does this mean that, like Tolstoy’s happy families, successful family firms are all alike? Since we neither sought nor ever expected to find any universal prescriptions for family firm success, we would have to answer no. But there seem to be at least some guiding patterns and principles that members, advisors, leaders and aspiring leaders of family firms, as well as business and management educators, will find useful. We hope that our efforts to explain them here will help all these parties in their efforts to understand and lead family firms to their full potential.

Stars Under the Southern Cross: The Untold Stories of Queensland’s Family Businesses

Compiled by Noel J. Lindsay and Justin Craig (2000)

Synopsis:

This book, a Centenary of Federation celebration project, contains many Queensland family business stories that had been forgotten for one reason or another. Stories of hardship, of sadness, of joy and of success, as well as some failures. There are stories of families and businesses that have gone on to become household names both in Australia and overseas. The stories come from all regions of Queensland and all industries are represented, such is the scope of the family business community.
Stories from Queensland’s family businesses could fill many books like this one. There are many more families who have contributed to the social and economic fabric of Queensland that are not mentioned in this collection of 87 stories. Family businesses have been and will continue to be the backbone of the State, and this is a snapshot is small subset of these firms.