But in Silver’s case, his father
Bob, who had run the company before him, put the notion that Don was abandoning
the family business into sharp focus: “Your grandfather’s dead, Don,” he said.
“He doesn’t care.”“Looking back, that helped me get some perspective on the
situation,” recalls Don. Since 1999, Silver has enjoyed life away from the
family company, and realizes the strain it put on him. “Hardly a day goes by
where I’m relieved not to have 650 people and their families dependent on me,
not to mention my own extended family,” he says. He also rediscovered a
long-dormant relationship with his father. After Don joined the company in 1984,
at age 28, he says that “barriers came up that I never expected to see” between
his dad, then CEO, and himself. “It was hard to separate him from the boss.”
That’s not an uncommon family dynamic, and generational succession can turn
into cultural warfare at times. “Succession typically involves two people whose
time horizons and outlooks on life are very different,” says Poza. “It’s often a
parent and child in their 60s and 40s, respectively, having passionate
discussions about how to move the business forward. It’s a predictable point of
conflict, and can be very useful if it’s functional in helping to change the
business.” Hilburt-Davis says 90 percent of the problems she encounters with
client businesses have to do with the family’s inability to separate family and
business in an appropriate way. She recalls one family she worked with recently.
The son was slated to take over the firm, but the mother, as president, knew he
was ill-equipped for the task. “She knew he wasn’t right for the role,” says
Hilburt-Davis, “but as a mother, she wanted him to succeed.”
Cultural Revival
Still, many families have passed the corporate
baton and watched the younger generation successfully transform the company’s
culture while holding on to core values. Carol Lavin Bernick instituted a
major cultural overhaul at Alberto-Culver’s North American operations. “In 1994,
when my husband and I took the reins of the business my father and mother had
built, we faced flattened sales and slipping margins on our best-known consumer
brands,” she wrote in a Harvard Business Review essay called “When Your Culture
Needs a Makeover.” Employee morale was flatlining along with sales, and turnover
was twice the industry average.
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