Survival of the fittest
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“In November 2012 the Harvard Business Review, the management profession’s bible, published an article entitled “What You Can Learn from Family Business”. For decades the profession had looked down on family businesses as amateur and slapdash. Now three leading BCG consultants, Nicolas Kachaner, George Stalk and Alain Bloch, were changing tack.
The BCG trio argued that public companies have a lot of important lessons to learn from family companies, from the value of long-term thinking to the virtues of frugality. They commended family companies on their ability to develop a cadre of loyal staff; they may not be able to compete with investment banks or consultancies in hiring top talent, but they make up for it by developing high-performance teams that stick together for years. They pointed to a list of public companies that act rather like family companies. Nestlé, a Swiss food company, slightly underperforms its big competitors in good times but outperforms them in bad. Essilor, a global leader in optical lenses, is obsessed with cost, keeps its debt low and has little staff turnover.”
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