The Elephant in the Family Room
Managing the Complexities of Legacy Businesses
With keen recommendations for shepherding businesses and the involved family members through a bevy of issues, The Elephant in the Family Room is a helpful reference text.
Leadership coach René Sonneveld’s astute business guide The Elephant in the Family Room is about managing multigenerational family-owned businesses with minimal friction.
Family-owned businesses face unique challenges, the book asserts, including generational divides, power struggles, and divergent interests. Thus, those who lead them must consider the psychological implications of their approaches in addition to practical business concerns. These include family members’ feelings of insecurity, envy, and mistrust, leading to conflicts that run deeper than balance sheets. It includes recommendations for shepherding both businesses and families through a bevy of related issues.
Organized as a general guidebook, the book is divided into broad sections on navigating battles, weathering storms, and anchoring for success. Its chapters home in on topics including ambition and greed, cultural collisions, and business succession issues. Each chapter deals with a specific facet of family business dynamics, anticipating various scenarios one could encounter.
Case studies are used to back up the book’s points, as with a story about how members of a fourth-generation luxury leather goods manufacturer worked through an argument regarding traditionalist versus forward-thinking approaches, or with another about how a patriarch’s children worried about living up to his legacy. These lead into guidance on topics like handling dismissive remarks resulting in hurt feelings and misconstrued criticisms with emotional intelligence.
Though it’s practical in its orientation overall, the book broadens its scope with references to Greek mythology, thinkers like George Santayana, and modern psychology. While walking through typical divisions in family businesses, it draws on concepts like behavioral economics, systems thinking, and cognitive biases to explain how tensions, rifts, and outright conflicts can occur. Its recommendations for mitigating such issues with self-awareness and empathy are compelling, and its chapter-ending reflection questions are engaging.
Though the prose is smooth and clear on the whole, the book is also prone to generalizations, as with an assertion that “power struggles [are] manifestations of deep emotional tensions—fear, pride, conflicting loyalties, and hidden currents of mistrust.” More compelling are its personal examples and coverage of the various struggles that family-owned businesses must work through, supported by evidence of the psychological roots of such issues and suggestions for solutions to them. Matters including professionalization, governance structures, and dealing with in-laws are handled with clarity, helping set family-owned businesses up for long-term, sustainable success across the generations.
A psychologically perceptive guide for family-owned businesses, The Elephant in the Family Room is about keeping the peace while attaining continuing organizational success.
Reviewed by
Joseph S. Pete
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
