Myths and Mortals. Keyt Andrew

emotional load was the burden of trying to run his areas of responsibility just like his father did – trying to be everywhere at once and managing every detail. As he remembers it, “I was running around…trying to be like my dad.” In the London flat that night, the pressure bore down on him. Bill Jr. withdrew momentarily from the meeting, not feeling well, and was sick in the bathroom. Returning to the meeting immediately after, he finished the business at hand. When the meeting was over, Bill thought to himself, “If I keep operating like this, I'm not going to make it to 40!”

      His mind reeled as he thought back to recent events of the previous day, as well as the culmination of traversing three continents in a matter of days and overseeing the painstaking details he was managing as he followed his father's path. That night, Bill's gut told the truth: The stress of emulating his father was beginning to clash with who he was and who he wanted to be as a leader. This internal dissonance prompted him to give a voice to the truth: “From this point forward, I am going to start doing things differently.”

      Getting sick that night was a pivotal point in Bill's life. He steered away from his father's style of leadership and began defining what style of leadership resonated with Bill – the next generation. He made a break.

      Bill realized that he was trying to emulate not just his father but also the command-and-control leadership philosophy of an entire generation of Americans. They were the Greatest Generation, leading in a way that worked for a country emerging from the Great Depression and World War II. And Bill's father exemplified the best of that generation: a strong work ethic, loyalty to his people, and genuine compassion for them. For years, the company had thrived under this leadership style.

      But it wasn't working for Bill, for one increasingly obvious reason – a blind spot so big that Bill had initially lost himself in it: He was not his father, though he was trying to be him.

      The involuntary gut check in London prompted an integrity check as well. Leading as his father led was frustrating and stifling to him, because it wasn't true to Bill's strengths and his skill sets as well as his personal philosophy of how to get the best out of people.

      It also stifled the company. The command-and-control model, which Bill describes as “the pollinating bee effect,” demanded that every decision, no matter how small, got the “king” bee's approval. “If you wanted to change the color of the carpet in China, the approval had to come from my father's desk!” In effect, the pollination was inhibiting growth. What had been so successful in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s now frustrated innovation among the organization's top leaders across the globe. Bill realized that he would have to redefine a vision of success for himself first, and then for the company.

      Born in the Shadows

      This scenario plays out in different ways for people like Bill, children of powerful parents who are called to lead successful family businesses into the next era. These children are born into a story already being told about their parents, their families, and businesses. Larger than life, the stories of heroism, history, and success seem impossible to replicate. Historically, family businesses have been the backbone of our economy and our communities, and the stories of the founder and the family have grown with each succession. Family businesses, however, are more than lore; they are the natural unit of our economic enterprise. They take greater ownership and responsibility for the long-term well-being of their businesses, through stewardship of both their financial assets and investing in their employees, and their communities.1

      I believe that family businesses can continue to solidify our economies into the future. But the challenge is great. Huge corporations dominate the economic landscape. Many of these are relatively new, responsive organizations that started small but grew to rule the market (like Amazon and Google). We laud entrepreneurs who build these companies, and often overlook those who have built strong and stable organizations across generations. Building a strong business is one challenge; building an organization that can sustain both a family and a business that benefits family, employees, and the community across generations is an entirely different challenge.

      The individuals at the center of these legacy companies are family business successors. These successors have the herculean task of trying to establish their own identities, passions, and beliefs, and develop their own leadership styles while dealing with the expectations and shadows of their parents', grandparents', and great grandparents' success.

      My 20 years working with family business owners and teaching successors in the Next Generation Leadership Institute at Loyola University Chicago's Quinlan School of Business and through Next Generation activities with the Family Business Network confirms the struggle of a successor to emerge from the shadows cast by these stories. In one sense, the stories help successors make sense of their relationship with their parents and their family history. They can inspire the successor to think big. But too often in the telling of these stories, the parents' failures and vulnerabilities become appendices to the larger narrative, or are lost altogether in the repeated recounting of their heroics. If a parent is building an empire, a child reasons, the stories explain their parents' absence and why they always felt like a runner-up in the pick of priorities. The stories create myths of the predecessor, encouraging the idea that the successor must lead without vulnerability or failure, and that success comes from an almost magical quality that their parent possesses. This prompts the next generation to excessively emulate their parents and to avoid failure at all costs. What confidence a successor may possess can be crushed by the monolithic message, “You'll never be as good as your dad.”

      Definition of the Myth

      When these stories are treated as truth, they can have an inspiring effect on both the family and the business. But when the stories grow into legends, they can lose their grounding in facts. They become myth, an amalgamation of fact and fiction that can cast a very long shadow. When it conveys a worldview based on values of self-determination, caring for employees and the community, hard work, and achievement, a founding myth can be a powerful generative force in a family. But when a myth focuses exclusively on the founder or the family mythology (in later generation family businesses), it stifles the family and curtails the legacy. The shadow lengthens as the story is interpreted by family, employees, customers, and the community. Wanting to create a heroic leader, we overlook the weaknesses, failures, and idiosyncrasies that are also a part of the story. And wanting to bask in the glory of the myth, many predecessors encourage its growth and development. In the mythical version, the predecessors become like deities.

      The shadow the mythology creates makes the successor's task seem almost impossible, and the predecessor's success seemingly magical. The truth shows otherwise. The successes of the predecessors and of the family were the result of hard work and vision, combined with failure, doubts, the contributions and support of others, and even a bit of luck. Too often, the ego enjoys bathing in the glory of this myth, encouraging it to flourish.

      This book explores how next-generation leaders who follow in the footsteps of their mythic parents, grandparents, as well as aunts and uncles, can step outside of the shadows these stories create and leverage their legacy for success, see their parents in the light of reality, and understand their own gifts and bring them to the table for the benefit of both the family and the business.

      A Journey to Generative Leadership

      Over the course of several years, I have interviewed successors in family businesses from across the globe, children of iconic families who stepped out of the shadow of the myth. Such leaders include Bill Wrigley Jr., Christie Hefner, Pierre Emmanuel Taittinger, Massimo Ferragamo, John Tyson, Dick DeVos, Karl-Erivan Haub, and many others. I have interviewed successors from second-generation to eleventh-generation family businesses – all of whom grew up in the shadow of highly successful parents (and sometimes grandparents and great-grandparents) and yet took their family business to another level of success. Amidst self-doubt, family scrutiny, employee skepticism, and public pressure, these leaders took on the difficult job of following either a founder or another successful ancestor, and established themselves as authentic, credible, and generative leaders. They figured out how to lead in a way that emerged from a strong sense of who they are. They did not merely copy the predecessor's leadership approach, “attaching” their personality to it. Instead,

1

D. Miller and I. LeBreton-Miller, Managing for the Long Run (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2005) p.18–31.