René Sonneveld is a “family and corporate governance champion.” Beginning in the banking sector, he later pivoted to consultancy roles where he assisted family businesses through particularly sticky moments—especially succession and inheritance affairs. In THE ELEPHANT IN THE FAMILY ROOM, Sonneveld explains how the mingled concerns of interpersonal and familial dynamics map onto corporate structures, as well as how to navigate them.
The underlying principles here are clear and sound. The text begins by establishing, in effect, our shared humanity—noting the cognitive biases to which businesspeople are beholden, as well as the physiological phenomena (like fight-or-flight responses) that can characterize their interactions. This establishes a kind of somatic-emotional-professional pipeline, allowing parties to identify how a business decision is driven by emotional concerns felt in the physical body. Ultimately, the solutions are straightforward but critical: open communication; clear expectations and boundaries; governance bodies that enforce the rules and decentralize power. THE ELEPHANT IN THE FAMILY ROOM even provides several appendices with draft or example documents showing how to put these things into place.
The structure of the text itself, however, could be improved. This book touches on many different “case study” families—some from Sonneveld’s practice, some from history—and it flits from one to the next too rapidly. Many of the same principles obtain in every case, so the reader doesn’t gain much from seeing so many examples shallowly treated. What should be reinforcement just feels like repetition. A better structure might dig in on a small handful of examples, focusing more intently on how the core principles show up, and how the best practices should be applied.
The text also has its own notable biases, which undercut some of the reader’s trust. Gender is conspicuously absent, considering that the subjects of the text are overwhelmingly patriarchal enterprises reinforced by underlying cultural norms. When dealing with a new intimate partner of a family leader, meanwhile, the text suggests the emotionally and morally repugnant step of restricting their access to money and disbursing small payments over time “through a discretionary trust—often with behavioral conditions—[which] can offer both generosity and control,” as though policing someone’s private life while dangling the possibility of destitution is a fair solution to an admittedly difficult interpersonal problem. Some of the examples of “successful” family businesses bear greater scrutiny as well. The Walton family (of Walmart) is lauded for its “core values, such as affordability, operational excellence, and community involvement,” but in America, the family is best known for paying its workers so little that a majority of them require food stamps to survive. Even the historical examples are questionable. The Florentine Medici family, for instance, did not attain a “balance of tradition and innovation [that] allowed their legacy to endure for centuries.” Plagued by corruption scandals, the family was exiled from Florence. Their legacy was assured not by sound business practices but by the Holy Roman Emperor, who forcibly established them as un-elected, hereditary dukes.
Despite these missteps, THE ELEPHANT IN THE FAMILY ROOM is still a valuable reference for its core arguments about the humanity of business leaders and the necessity of strong structures to profitably guide their interactions.
René Sonneveld’s THE ELEPHANT IN THE FAMILY ROOM: Managing the Complexities of Legacy Businesses has a strong and successful core argument.
~Dan Accardi for IndieReader