Family Enterprise Insights
Family enterprises face unique challenges as family relationships, ownership structures, and operating businesses evolve across generations. This collection of articles reflects Generation6’s research and advisory experience, exploring the frameworks and decisions that shape alignment, leadership, and continuity over time.
Explore Thought Leadership by Topic
FAMILY DEVELOPMENT & DYNAMICS
Family relationships shape how effectively governance and ownership systems function over time. These articles examine communication, cohesion, and generational transitions that influence alignment and continuity.
FAMILY & BUSINESS GOVERNANCE
Family enterprise governance defines how decisions are made, roles are clarified, and accountability is sustained across generations. These articles explore governance structures, boards, and frameworks that support alignment and long-term continuity.
FAMILY OFFICE & ENTERPRISE STRUCTURES
Family offices and enterprise structures sit at the intersection of family, ownership, and shared assets. These articles explore how structures are designed and evolve to support coordination, clarity, and long-term performance.
STEWARDSHIP & OWNERSHIP
Ownership in a family enterprise carries responsibilities that extend beyond financial interests. These articles explore ownership roles, decision-making, and the development of capable stewards across generations.
STRATEGY & DECISION-MAKING
Family enterprises face complex strategic and financial decisions shaped by both business realities and family priorities. These articles explore how families approach growth, investment, risk, and long-term decision-making.
ADVISORY APPROACH
Effective advisory in family enterprise requires both structural clarity and relational understanding. These articles reflect how Generation6 works with families, including our philosophy, partnership model, and perspectives on long-term continuity.
Our Recent Articles
Does the Family Matter? Improving Executive Compensation Practices in Family Firms
The salaries of top executives can be a hot topic and a source of stress – at family businesses and non-family firms. How can family business leaders decide what’s fair?
Don't Send Your Kids to Work Outside the Family Business Just Yet!
Should family members work outside the family business before joining? Experts have long recommended that this is the best (and only!) way - but does it make a difference, in the real world, to have the next generation work on the outside?
Developing Your Business Family Strategy: Where to Start and What to Consider
Successful, long-lasting business families have a family strategy: A shared understanding of what is important to them, what they want to do together, and how they want to work together to achieve their collective goals and vision.
Family Businesses Must Plan for the Unthinkable
Why do we, as humans, tend to minimize real threats, and what can family businesses do to appropriately prepare for existential hazards?
The current employment squeeze: Curse or blessing in disguise?
Not a single board I am on nor any of the other multitude of business leaders I am in contact with are free from the current wage pressures, perhaps the highest we’ve seen in more than thirty years.
Dealing with the current and coming capacity squeeze
As we are experiencing a serious reduction in manufacturing capacity - as a nation and perhaps globally - I am advocating for an ‘invest in the future’ approach, counter to the tendency to play it safe in times of uncertainty.
A few thoughts on dividends in the family business
Disagreements about dividends can cause serious family conflicts. Family business leaders are left hanging when it comes to developing a dividend policy that supports the business and fits their family’s values, needs, and objectives.
Let’s Continue the Conversation
Many of the topics explored in our articles arise directly from conversations with multigenerational families navigating complex transitions.
If your family is considering governance development, leadership transition, or strengthening alignment across generations, we welcome the opportunity to connect.