’m usually rather good about not writing on topics with which I’m not well acquainted, being a firm believer in Alexander Pope’s comment that “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” Nonetheless, I have sallied forth with this issue organized around “birth order,” only to find out that birth order is much more complicated than I had thought. And I don’t just mean Alfred Adler’s concept of birth order, introduced into the psychological field in the early 20th century.
he authors of “Not All Created Equal” present a thoughtful and well-researched paper on the topic of birth order and role identity. Interestingly enough, their own section on “Limitations” highlights why this paper may have narrow applicability to practitioners dealing with clients outside of Korea while at the same time raising broad theoretical questions for family enterprise research on birth order, gender and primogeniture.
- Founders, first son (FS) owners, and non-first son (NFS) owners appoint themselves CEO in 72%, 67% and 51% of the cases, respectively.
- The prevalence of non-family CEOs is greater in NFS owner firms.
- The prevalence of external influences in control and monitoring structures is higher for NFS controlled firms, than in founder or FS controlled firms.
- NFS descendants are associated with higher family firm performance, perhaps because they are more inclined toward non-familial meritocracy.
he year 2019 will mark the 50th anniversary of “walking on the moon”, a strange and foreign concept even today. Even stranger is the notion that life expectancy is now more or less casually discussed in terms of 100 years or slightly less.
With the increase of longevity comes a deeper awareness of the impact of competence. There are two sides to competence: sustained competence (when an older, competent family member, e.g., Queen Elizabeth, chooses not to leave or step down because she enjoys it and does not have to) and diminished competence (when the family business member has begun the long runway of diminishing competence, yet either is not aware of it or refuses to acknowledge it).
t is my fervent conviction that there existed in relatively recent generations some women who never, or rarely, compared themselves to men, did not worry about gender identity, and most asuuredly did not survive financially on inherited wealth. Either by accident (mostly unfortunate accident) or by design.
Here they are – a very regrettably finite list.
very few years each of us must make the trek to the DMV to get a new picture for our driver’s license. We all talk about it — the aggravation of the time it takes — the frustration with the sitting, trying to pose and hearing the click just before you are ready.
ver a recent family dinner, my daughter shared an unfortunate work situation which resulted in her feeling embarrassed in front of one of her colleagues. The reflexive response of “I’m so sorry that happened” didn’t seem to soothe our daughter who responded, “well, it wasn’t YOUR fault!”
