More and more retirement-age executives are taking jobs at their children's companies. Senior writer Anne Fisher, at Fortune Magazine has a few interesting family business profiles on June 21 2007-a reversal from the traditional appoach-kids who work for dad or mom.
Abstract (Document Summary)
"Going to work for one of your kids, as more and more retirement-age executives are doing, is a challenge. It requires a huge psychological shift on both sides, and experts say that many an enterprise has gone down in flames because parents and their children can't shed old habits and adopt new, businesslike roles. Most entrepreneurs with a parent in their employ admit to experiencing deja vu, especially if the employee is also a stockholder. Because her dad owns 25% of her company, Marissa Shipman says sometimes when she needs to spend money to launch a new product, it reminds her of being a kid asking her dad for allowance money. [...] Robert Shipman sold his clothing manufacturing company that had $130 million in annual sales and retired in 1980, at age 45. Today Shipman works for his daughter Marissa, 28, who started a cosmetics company called the Balm in 2003"
[...]
"Plenty of parents know they need to back off and let the kid run the company, but they just don't know how. Ira Bryck, director of the Family Business Center at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, recommends learning a new way of making suggestions that he calls strategic questioning. The deadliest power struggles, it seems, occur between fathers and sons. Some families work out private code words for defusing the stress of an argument. Having performance objectives from the get-go can make a huge difference."
Full story in Fortune here>>[...]
Walter Derzko -"Changing the world, one idea at a time"©
Walter Derzko teaches at the Certificate Program on Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Toronto, School of Continuing Studies, which starts in the Fall of 2007
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