Battles For Ownership

Switch on any of the popular Indian channels and you will find yourself watching episodic versions of Indian mythology such as Ramayana and Mahabharata. You may even get a chance to see Vali and Sugreeva battling over Kishkinda kingdom. Or, flick channels and you may have the whole saga of hatred between the Kauravas and the Pandavas played out before your eyes.

Now, move to newspapers and news portals. On an average, there is at least one story a day about the Ambani family feud. Or, there is some story on the erstwhile battle over the validity of Priamvada Birla's will, which has left assets worth more than Rs 5,000 crore to the company's co-chairman Rajendra S. Lodha. While the Tata Group is sailing smoothly at the moment, the company is without a successor. Only time will tell who will head the Group once Ratan Tata steps down. And then there is the the Mirchandani siblings Gulu and Sonu, promoters of the MIRC Electronics (Onida) who recently settled the ownership dispute.

Sibling rivalry, malevolent relations, parental oppression, infidelity or dictatorship – all these are sure shot way of brewing a war within the family, especially if all of the above is related to running a business. Family Wars: Classic Conflicts In Family Business And How To Deal With Them takes into account all the possible factors which becomes the cause of feud in a family business.

The book gives an account of what family businesses are made of, taking cues from the Bible to The Godfather to the present day business battles threatening to split families.
 

Gordon, director, general of London-based Institute for Family Business and Nicholson professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School chalk out the area of conflicts and their causes which can pull down, split or even rupture the greatest of business empires along with detailed family trees of the cases they mention.

Books such as this can be used in ways more than one. While family-run businesses can not only learn the consequences of a particular scenario and apply it to their situation, they could also foresee some of the conflicts that could erupt down the generations, especially if the business is run by a first generation entrepreneur.

Gordon and Nicholson have researched 24 cases from around the world on the families and their business feuds which had repercussions ranging from split in business and downturn to even a murder. Some of the classic cases in the book include the Ambani family, the Gucci family, the Ford family and the Pathak family.

The book chalks out brotherhood and sisterhood rivalry, battle between parents and offsprings for control and autonomy, insularity and egoistic differences as main reasons for such wars. It goes on to explain the 'gene lottery' according to which each and every individual has an independent personality. Hence, the son of an entrepreneur is not always an entrepreneur. It highlights how the intervention of external (non-family) talent can bring a new life to the company, when the successors of a business empire are not as capable as the founder.

The authors also explain that a power hungry or histrionic individual can eventually harm not just the monetary profits but the integrity of a company too. The case of Solid Waste and the Waxman Family is a crucial example of infidelity under this genre.

Family businesses are vital to several developing countries and form a sizeable chunk of a country's growth and GDP. However, internal feuds rocking the business not only affect the company and its shareholders but also the economy in the larger picture, point out the authors.

The case studies are insightful and worth reading to both a lay reader as well as someone who is running a business. The introduction to each chapter in the form of analyses and presentation of family cases is the USP of the book. It completely holds the reader's attention from the beginning to the end without drawing the reader to irrelevant details.

It is simply a matter of learning lessons right -- be it from episodes in Indian mythology or from the ongoing battles for ownership among families in India and across the globe that Family Wars lists.

chetna (at) bworldmail (dot) com