Harvard Business Review Family Business Handbook

The one book you need to navigate the complex decisions and critical relationships necessary to create and sustain a healthy family business--and business family.

Though "family business" may sound like it refers only to mom-and-pop shops, businesses owned by families are among the most significant and numerous in the world. But surprisingly few resources exist to help navigate the unique challenges you face when you share the executive suite, tax returns, and holidays. How do you make the right decisions, critical to the long-term survival of any business, with the added challenge of having to do so within the context of a family?

This comprehensive handbook brings you sophisticated guidance and practical advice from family business experts Josh Baron and Rob Lachenauer. Based on their decades-long experience working closely with a wide range of family businesses around the world, the authors present proven methods and approaches.

In the HBR Family Business Handbook you'll find:

• A new perspective on what makes family businesses succeed and fail
• A framework to help you address the myriad decisions facing your family business including how to make good decisions together
• Step-by-step guidance to help you understand what type of family business you own, define success on your own terms, communicate effectively, manage conflict, prepare for changes within your business family, and transition to the next generation
• Key questions about wealth, unique to family businesses, that you can't afford not to ask yourself and your family
• Exercises and assessments to help you determine where you are and where you want to go
• Stories of real families and real companies, from Radio Flyer to Sierra Nevada Brewing Company

The HBR Family Business Handbook addresses these issues and more. Keep this guide with you to help you build, grow, and sustain your family business and your business family for years, and generations, to come.

HBR Handbooks provide ambitious professionals with the frameworks, advice, and tools they need to excel in their careers. With step-by-step guidance, time-honed best practices, real-life stories, and concise explanations of research published in Harvard Business Review, each comprehensive volume helps you to stand out from the pack--whatever your role.

About the Authors

Josh Baron is a cofounder and Partner at BanyanGlobal Family Business Advisors. He works with the leaders of family businesses to define their purpose as owners and establish the structures, strategies, and skills they need to accomplish their goals. A sought-after speaker who also teaches at Columbia Business School, Baron is a frequent contributor to HBR.org.

Rob Lachenauer is a cofounder, Partner, and CEO of BanyanGlobal Family Business Advisors. Lachenauer, who works around the world helping business families thrive, is also a frequent contributor to HBR.org. He is the coauthor, with George Stalk, of Hardball: Are You Playing to Play or Playing to Win?