This book focuses on a central success factor for family businesses: maintaining the decision-making ability over generations while not jeopardizing the business due to family conflict, inefficient governance structures, or lack of identification. The authors identify that this is not as easy as the endeavor to bring two social systems together with contradicting logic (family and business) leads to many dangerous pitfalls. This book presents outcomes of a unique research project in which family managers of eleven of the oldest and largest German family businesses, at least the fourth generation, met for more than three years on a regular basis and presented the essence of their family governance structures to each other and to the authors. It was a joint "learning journey" that admits identifying twelve core questions that these families had been answering to keep up the relationship between family and business successfully over generations. Obviously, there is no "right" answer to these questions. The key to success is rather engaging the families in a process to find out their own answers and make them aware of the "two sides": being a family is different from being a business family.

This book focuses on a central success factor for family businesses: maintaining the decision-making ability over generations while not jeopardizing the business due to family conflict, inefficient governance structures, or lack of identification. The authors identify that this is not as easy as the endeavor to bring two social systems together with contradicting logic (family and business) leads to many dangerous pitfalls. This book presents outcomes of a unique research project in which family managers of eleven of the oldest and largest German family businesses, at least the fourth generation, met for more than three years on a regular basis and presented the essence of their family governance structures to each other and to the authors. It was a joint "learning journey" that admits identifying twelve core questions that these families had been answering to keep up the relationship between family and business successfully over generations. Obviously, there is no "right" answer to these questions. The key to success is rather engaging the families in a process to find out their own answers and make them aware of the "two sides": being a family is different from being a business family.

-Family businesses are the archetype of all business activities. Since family businesses provide even today about 70 percent of all jobs in Germany, most people know these structures from their own experience," writes Jon Baumhauer, the chief executive of the family holding of the Merck Group, in his Preface to this volume. The special thing about family businesses is that the persons involved are simultaneously members of family and firm. These two systems overlap with their very different emotional and rational logic, and sometimes put their decisionmakers in situations that are impossible to solve and have the quality of true paradoxes. This circumstance is a great challenge to both the family and the company and sometimes exposes both to such unreasonable and untenable demands.The goal of this volume is to illuminate the interaction of family, shareholders and company from various perspectives and to ask questions that can help the reader to better understand the complexity with which the parties concerned are confronted.