Some 80+% of businesses world wide can be defined as family businesses. Yet, in Management 101 textbooks, rarely are family firms mentioned at all. In most management texts, family firms are mentioned in the chapter on entrepreneurship, and even then they tend to get 2- 4 pages worth of attention. When you factor in the fact that family firms (when loosely defined–think Ford Motor Company) make up about 1/3 of the S&P 500 companies, the neglect of family businesses as drivers of the global economy is like the elephant standing in the corner of the room.
What is going on here?
Big, publicly traded firms embody all the values the most Americans want to project onto business. Democratic organization, democratic ownership (via shares), tough-guy CEOs making decisions without emotion or wimpy loyalties, meritocratic stage for a Darwinian showdown, etc. The fact, strangely, is that while BigCo occupies most of the news on bizporn channels such as CNBC, those companies more represent our larger cultural obsession with business than it does what actually makes up the goings on in the world of business.
Why Does This Matter?
The implicit bias against small, family owned firms (even though they make up around 60% of GDP in the US) underscores the built-in and unquestioned separation in American society between work (and business) and life. For the most part, our business culture is wired in such a way that the two (business and family) are designed NOT to intersect. In some strange and perverse way, family firms are subversive to the mainstream of American business culture because they dare to integrate work and life.
Enterprise Tribes
The coworking movement also threatens the cultural separation between work and life, and thus coworking is subversive before it even gets fully off the ground. In Austin, Kevin Koym of Enterprise Teaming has pioneered a form of collaborative organization that draws on local tribes of entrepreneurs who bring work and life together in a seamless web of projects as they make sense to tribal members. Enterprise teaming is part of a larger ecology in Austin that is being built around Bootstrap Austin, which is headed up by Bijoy Goswami and his firm, Aviri. Bijoy’s energy is a big part of the creative churn in the entrepreneurial scene in the City of Ideas, to be sure.
And just today, another iteration of business collaborative has come online: Conjunctured. Conjunctured is loosely defined as a co-working company, or ‘co-company,’ and as it is still evolving and finding definition, I will not try to impose too much structure/definition on it yet. That is up to the guys: Dusty, John, Cesar, David, and Matt.
Congrats and way to go!
The Butcher
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