Book Review: Kavil Ramachandran,The 10 Commandments for Family Business

On a recent flight from Chennai to Ahmedabad (both cities in India), I happened to sit next to a second-generation family business owner. Being a scholar in the area of entrepreneurship, I was curious to learn more on family business from him during the 2 hours we were airborne. While he spoke of his father’s legacy and his challenges in keeping the growth momentum, he raised concern over the future of his business. He seemed to be concerned about his children and their lack of interest in taking over the business. He began questioning me if there was research to guide him on how family business kept the business alive without compromising the interests of the family members. Based on his personal worries and the experiences of significant others that he had met and seen in life, he seemed certain that only a few family businesses would survive three generations. He even went to the extent of sharing his phone number to stay connected so that I could conduct some inquiry on this important family business challenge.

Family business sits at the intersection of ‘family’ and ‘business’ domains. Each of them is rich, dynamic and complex individually, thus making their combination only more difficult to explore. Academic literature in the area of family business is growing if not proliferating. There are many journals that publish articles on this significant topic. Edited volumes, cases and practitioner accounts are widely available. Apart from continuing to read the above, a few weeks after this interesting in-flight conversation, I received Kavil Ramachandran’s book for review. A quick reading assured me that this person I met on the flight was not an exception, and there were ways in which family businesses can keep their families and businesses running successfully across generations. While my co-passenger on the flight would have preferred a ‘magic wand’, the book told me that keeping a family business thriving is not easy and definitely not for the faint-hearted family.

One of the big challenges in any book offered by consultants is that it educates the reader and makes them call the author for help. This book is an exception. It offers all templates but raises a different catch. While templates are offered, the sheer quantity and complexity will still have to make the reader call a suitable consultant for help. Ignoring these challenges, it at least offers hope to family business owners that there is a way out in making their organisations sustain and grow with the generations. The 10 Commandments are obvious even to the lay reader, but when one goes over the contents, they are fairly contextual to family businesses. While a few of the chapters are very specific to family businesses in particular, many others are general and have specific content interspersed within the chapters. Figure 2 (p. 32) titled ‘No man’s land’, conduct at home and work (pp. 51–55) and togetherness assumption (p. 67) are a few examples of this variety.

The Five Ds to Disaster (p. xxxviii), namely, dilemmas, deviation, differences, disputes and destruction, is a very interesting model. I am sure it comes from the author’s deep involvement with family businesses over decades. They showcase to every family business owner that the fall does not happen all of a sudden and definitely not only due to external factors. Commandment five, to redefine role but never retire, is my personal favourite. It is a topic of personal and philosophical interest. It is equally interesting in the larger space of entrepreneurship. There are some interesting papers being written in recent times on this topic. The other chapter that I looked forward to learn a lot from was the conclusion titled ‘Family as an institution’. But to my utter dismay, it made me feel like how I hear the general public define entrepreneurship. Institution building theory has a fairly long history. Ignoring it and not adapting to it was a lost opportunity.

At first glance, it seemed to me a book by a consultant than an academic. For a book by a professor, this title is surprisingly devoid of any academic references. It is indeed rare to see that almost every illustration, caselet and template in the book is the author’s original rendering. For example, when I looked at Figure I.1 (p. xxvi), I was reminded of Greiner’s (1972) life cycle model, though no reference to it is made. Scholars and doctoral students may not gain much from reading this book other than inspiration and some imagined ideas to pursue. Sorenson, Andy, Brigham and Lumpkin (2013) provide a more scholarly overview of family business research and provide innumerable areas for future inquiry. Consultants and practitioners have a lot to gain from this book. The 10 Commandments provide a simple and broad framework to analyse, study and plan transformation of family businesses. The case examples, especially from the Indian environment, will be handy for faculty who teach courses on family business. The worksheets/templates at the end of every chapter can be useful in consulting as well as in the classroom. I have always been wary of books that share only successful consulting examples, which we (consultants) know are a small proportion of the cases handled. As one who has moved into the scholarly community after spending a decade in the consulting profession, I can only empathise with the reader to absorb the material with a pinch of salt. Having seen both sides, I now believe presenting a more balanced view of consulting experience will make the intellect cuisine more palatable and tasty, especially when the potential readers (family business owners) are entrepreneurial folk.