circle

Tradition and adaptation in Chinese family enterprises: Facing the challenge of continuity

And what your family enterprises can learn from those challenges

Successful entrepreneurs everywhere in the world are often highly controlling and viewed by their children as larger than life. Indeed, talking about continuity across generations is difficult for most business families in every culture.

Finding answers to this challenge will require understanding the general dynamics of family-controlled businesses, as well as the particular cultural orientation of Chinese enterprise, enhancing their innate capacity to adapt to contemporary conditions in their own way.

There are three specific critical challenges that Chinese family enterprises will have to meet and resolve: 1. The senior generation “letting go”—managing the retirement of founding patriarchs; 2. The junior generation “taking charge”—developing capabilities and harmoniously integrating the next generation of family shareholders/managers; and, 3. Governance design—creating governance architecture and family collaboration that is responsive to global standards of accountability and transparency, while maintaining family commitment and investment.

We will discuss each challenge in turn, analyzing its sources and discussing strategies for responding that apply lessons from experience in family business governance to the cultural realities of this region.

Read the full article here in PDF

Authors

Related services

Preferred Language:


Lansberg Gersick Advisors complies with GDPR guidelines. Please confirm you agree to receiving Emails from us:

Please check the box to agree to our data protection policy

We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By clicking below to subscribe, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing. Learn more about Mailchimp's privacy practices here.

Recommended for you

Divide
Articles

Jobs vs. Wealth

Family leaders must have the courage and stamina to create an inclusive, participative, and results-driven culture in the family and business, supported by the right policies and systems. Such a foundation will set the stage for a family legacy which both sustains across multiple future generations, and grows along the way with each group driving growth and diversification and making its own mark.

Articles

Growing up Green

Why is it hard to find good successors? We believe that the root issues occur earlier in the lives of next-gen members, linked to the manner in which they experience their family’s wealth and legacy during adolescence and early adulthood.

stewarding family businesses into institutions pillars
Articles

Stewarding businesses into institutions

In light of the many crises that haunt the daily news cycle, there is one segment of the corporate landscape that seems to be weathering the storm better than most: family businesses.