Avoiding the Best Practices Trap in Family Business Succession
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Copying what successful companies do has intuitive appeal and the logic of mimicking success cases is also well documented in the scholarly literature, but adopting "best practices" does not guarantee improved performance. <br/>In the field of family business, itis widely assumed by both family business owners and their advisors that best practices, if adopted, can help to ensure a smooth transition of family control from one generation to the next. One of the best practices whose effectiveness is taken for granted is the family constitution, a written agreement among family members about their vision and mission, their shared values and ambitions, and the policies concerning the governance of the family and its business. As a recent article, "The rise of the family business constitution" in The Financial Times put it, "once a document is agreed, people stick to it".