Myths & Mortals: Family Business Leadership and Succession Planning

What’s in a word? If that word is “succession,” then quite a lot, according to Andrew Keyt, author of Myths & Mortals: Family Business Leadership and Succession Planning (Wiley Press: 2015). Keyt’s book takes on the oft-messy topic of successful generational family-business transition. In simply considering the very word “succession” – and how “success” is implicitly built in – it takes little to recognize the challenges in tackling the big, hairy, audacious goal of handing over the family enterprise. How to begin to understand some of these challenges is at the heart of Keyt’s book. To accomplish this, Keyt relies on extensive interviews with successor CEOs of family-owned businesses, in the process homing in on a handful of issues and identifying commonalities impacting this knotty process. The reader is exposed to the leadership in some of the most prominent family-owned companies, including Amway, Wrigley Gum, Playboy Enterprises, Crane & Co., Tyson, and champagne producer Taittinger, among others. Through interviews, directed by Keyt’s interpretation, we learn about the successor’s early exposure to the family business, the family dynamics and relationships framing her or his stance toward the organization, and the subsequent stages and decisions involved in stepping into the shoes of the previous leadership. As the title points out, Keyt’s purpose in writing the book is to show how success in a family business can often lead, over time, to the manufacture of myths surrounding its founder(s) and even subsequent generational leaders. For those in line to take the reins, these idealizations, routinely perpetuated both within the organization as well as immediate environment, can appear as insurmountable obstacles in terms of retaining the legacy, living up to expectations, or duplicating and even surpassing the success of preceding generations. The common thread Keyt weaves through his book is that self-awareness, followed by differentiation, or creating one’s own destiny within the family business, can begin to pave the way to a healthy and prosperous future for both the company and its incoming leader.

Myths and Mortals is less of a prescriptive guide to family business succession and focussed more on providing its readers with a vehicle for reflection and sense-making (“das Verstehen”) to the issues that can get in the way of effective leadership transition. This is a good thing – there are plenty of how-to books available on the market to direct families, their boards, and their advisors through the process. In interviewing 28 successors, Keyt’s interpretive approach permits him to crack open and shed light into the black box of family business decision making, especially at the individual level. With an overabundance of empirical studies coming off the scholarly assembly line, it is refreshing to follow what Keyt’s qualitative inquiry reveals about the goings-on inside the heads of successors, before, during, and after they take over their family business. His line of inquiry peels the layers of the two interconnected spheres, family, and business, taking the reader from the challenges of differentiation – or the process of separating one’s identify from that of the parent – over the course of the individual’s life cycle through their adjustment period once they occupy the leadership position. While Keyt offers a few instructional tools, which appear largely in the last chapter and the Epilogue, these take a backseat to the more existential exercise a reader may go through to take a hard look in the mirror and begin shedding the shackles that come with taking over a successful family business. In this way, Myths and Mortals offers a unique and valuable addition to the family business literature that can help next-generation leaders recognize that they are not alone in their challenges.

I have a personal disclaimer to share before proceeding: in business, I have learned more from failure than success. To that end, I continue to be drawn to tales of corporate malfunction. In the family business realm, these include Edgar Bronfman’s flawed decision to trade the family’s heritage in Seagram liquor for the fickle music business, Mondavi’s family infighting leading to the sale of their namesake vineyard to Constellation and, more recently, the very public clash for control of Lowell, Massachusetts-based grocer Market Basket between cousins Arthur S. and Arthur T. DeMoulas. Some of this may be chalked up to a slight case of Schadenfreude, but, more appropriately, I find the notion of what not to do in business to provide as many, if not more, nuggets of wisdom than what ought to be done. To that end, Keyt’s stories comprise largely successful transitions and how the involved cast of characters overcame – successfully, that is – personal or interpersonal struggles that allowed them to right the business or take it to the next level. It can be helpful to counterbalance these tales of achievement with an occasional example of where things simply did not work out, even within the ranks of companies covered in the book. For example, Keyt gives short shrift to Pierre Taittinger’s battle to wrestle control of Champagne Taittinger from the hands of a US private equity group. Surely, I can Google the details of why this preeminent brand fell in the hands of financial engineers, but some additional explanation as to the set of events that led to the family’s predicament in the first place can help us understand the direness of the situation faced by Pierre and, subsequently, the triumph of his decisions well made. Similarly, while Keyt’s interviews with Playboy’s Christie Hefner allow for many insightful revelations into her thought process leading up to her CEO-ship, I wanted to know how Christie felt about the 2010 decision to take the company private in light of declining revenues. Indeed, if stories represent the vehicles to the interpretation and the understanding or sense-making of what it takes to successfully take over the family business, then I was yearning for more of the mucky stuff.

Next-generation leaders, either in the making or already in the hot seat, looking for an affirmative message are the primary audience for this book. That said, the “other side,” the leadership preceding the incoming one, would be well served to read Myths and Mortals, for the mere fact that they may be reminded of what it felt like when they took over the business. In doing so, both parties can approach the tricky phase of transition with a higher level of compassion and understanding. Keyt’s book is sure to resonate with service providers whose clientele comprises family businesses, including financial advisors, consultants, and lawyers. By providing a deeper peek into the mindset of incoming leaders, these service providers can get a better sense of what it takes to balance the needs of the individual, the family and the business. Lastly, Myths and Mortals offers family business researchers a rare opportunity to get back to what it means to be family business owners, not in terms of their static characteristics, but rather in terms of the relationships, emotions, and even folklores that permeate their daily existence.