How three circles changed the way we understand family business

Forty-one years ago, Renato Tagiuri and I were looking for a framework to categorize the issues, interests and concerns voiced by Tagiuri’s executive students, most of whom led family companies. It was 1978, and I was a first-year doctoral student. Tagiuri was a faculty member in a Harvard Business School executive program and had invited me to be his research assistant.

Over the next four and a half years, we interviewed family company owner-managers and surveyed hundreds of executive students on various family business topics. We met almost daily in the lounge of Humphrey House on the business school campus to discuss our projects and findings. We would diagram one situation after another, try to explain why this issue or that problem came about, and how the family influenced the business. Almost nothing in the literature guided this exploration. The only conceptual model of a family business system at the time was a two-circle framework, which recognized the influence of family and business on each other and the need for alignment of goals and interests.

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About the Author(s)

John A Davis

Professor John A. Davis leads the family enterprise programs at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is chairman and founder of the Cambridge Family Enterprise Group, a global advisory, education and research organization for family enterprises (JohnDavis.com).


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