Business Case Studies, Executive Interviews, John A Davis on Family Businesses

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Executive Interviews: Interview with John A Davis on Family Businesses
May 2007 - By Dr. Nagendra V Chowdary


John A Davis
Senior Lecturer of Business Administration at Harvard Business School,
the Faculty chair for Harvard Business School`s Executive Education Program


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  • Congratulations professor for having accomplished phenomenal work on managing family businesses. Your research's impact is seen in most of the literature on managing family businesses (by way of citations, references etc.). What was that powerful trigger that has prompted you to embark on this research?
    As a graduate student at Harvard Business School, between 1977 and 1982, I was interested in organizational behavior and in the psychology of families. Harvard Professor Renato Tagiuri who became and remains my mentor considered my interests and recommended that I study family business.

    Tagiuri's recommendation seems obvious today but thirty years ago there wasn't much work on the topic of family business and it certainly wasn't a field of study yet. Tagiuri offered to supervise my work and he involved me in the teaching and research he was doing at HBS with owner-presidents of private companies. Over the next five years he and I pioneered some of the conceptual foundations of the family business field.

  • Can you share with us about your initial research journey? How could you get insights into managing family businesses? Was there any difficulty in breaking ice with family-run businesses, for, disclosure and divulgence must have been exceptions rather than imperatives.
    I have learned of many research opportunities through my students and clients, so identifying research opportunities and gaining access has been relatively easy. When you research a family business, and especially when you write a case on a family business, families and family companies are by their nature private; so, the families often want to disguise their situation so that the family and business identity aren't known. With the assurance of privacy, families are generally willing to have you study their issues and practices. But the desire for privacy can be very strong. I have had two cases that I labored over for months finally rejected by the family because they were uncomfortable with its content— even though these cases were highly disguised.

  • There are so many definitions of a family business. What, according to you, is a family business? What are the different typologies of the family business?
    A family business is one where a single family controls its ownership and where two or more family members significantly influence its direction through their management roles, ownership rights or family ties. Tagiuri and I introduced this definition in the late 1970s. Many other definitions persist but I believe that these other definitions are either too inclusive or too restrictive.

  • How is a family business system different from a joint-stock-company business system?
    A joint stock company (as far as I understand it in India) can be a family business or not. These are different types of categories.

  • You talk of a three-circle model of family business system (indicating system roles and relationships). What is this model all about?
    The Three-Circle Model, developed by Professor Tagiuri and myself in the late 1970s, identifies three overlapping groups of people employees, owners and family members—that inhabit the family business system. This critical but by now obvious framework has become the central paradigm of the field. It keeps our attention on the three important groups in the family business system, reminds us that the three groups need to be aligned, and also identifies the seven sub-groups (like family owner employee) that influence the family business.

  • What are the different phases of family business system's development across generations?
    The stages of development of a family business system are described in my book, Generation to Generation. For example, there are three basic ownership stages of a family business: controlling owner, sibling partnership and cousin consortium. Each of these stages describes a different configuration of family owners of the business. There are accompanying stages of development for the family and business. The important lessons of this developmental framework are that the family business system changes in rather predictable ways, and family business system leaders can and should anticipate these changes and prepare for them.

1. Family Owned Business Case Study
2. ICMR Case Collection
3. Case Study Volumes

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