C12 Decision Making and Structural Risk in Family Businesses
Prof. Dr. Arist von Schlippe, Prof. Dr. Alberto Gimeno
Family Businesses have constantly to deal with dilemmas. Usually, while the business grows, the family is also growing. So the family as well as the company is continuously confronted with certain challenges.
The question then is how business complexity and family complexity are balanced by governance structures, because if this is not done, the family as well as the company is facing a great “structural risk”. Therefore decision making in family business requires the need of considering the individual structural risk of each single family business.
The workshop will introduce a plausible model for assessing this risk. It will give the owner/manager a tool to identify easily and quickly the situation of the company showing at the same time the tasks: either to reduce business complexity (which of course is a risky operation) or family complexity (which may cause emotional conflict within the family) or to develop structure in governing business complexity as well as family complexity by elaborated family strategy.
The results of a large study with over 2.000 family business firms in Spain will also briefly be presented in the workshop.
Prof. Dr. Arist von Schlippe did his graduation and PhD in psychology. He is a licensed psychological psychotherapist and a licensed teacher for systemic therapy and supervision. Since April 2005 he holds the chair of “Leadership and Dynamics in Family Businesses” at Witten/Herdecke University. He is a specialist in crisis- and conflictmanagement.
Prof. Dr. Alberto Gimeno is Associate Professor at ESADE Business School, Barcelona. He is one of the founding partners of Family Business Knowledge (FBK), which develops both management tools for family businesses and studies on groups of family businesses. His research is focused on the application of the theory of complexity to family business management.
