Family businesses can’t be run by one generation for ever. At some stage, power must transfer to its children, then its grandchildren. It is a notoriously difficult process to manage.

New research suggests that business-owning families could smooth this transition by involving children as young as six in dinner-table conversations about their trade.

London Business School’s Åsa Björnberg and Nigel Nicholson suggest that the handover of power hinges on the extent to which younger family members feel a sense of ownership and belonging when they look at the family business.

They say that one way of building this attachment is to involve 6-11 year olds in dinner-time chatter about their older relatives’ exploits in the workplace: “This kind of early inclusion creates higher levels of attachment and identification that persist later in the person’s life.”

It is a difficult balance to strike. On the one hand, you don’t want to allow the child to feel alienated from a big part of the family heritage. But you also don’t want to put any career pressure on someone who has barely learned to write.

Dickens’ Dombey and Son showed the folly of the latter extreme. For those who haven’t read it, Mr Dombey is fixated on the idea that he be joined in his business by his only son, Paul. Yet in spite of having his future mapped out from birth, Paul dies in early childhood.

Of course, this is fiction and child mortality isn’t what it was in the 19th century. But six year-olds remain fragile vessels for dynastic ambitions – filling them with adult preoccupations at the dinner table still seems a bit Dickensian.

October 15, 2008 6:57pm in B-schools, Corporate culture | Comment