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Corporate Governance And The Family Business: Managing The Paradoxes, M. Barrett, K. Moore

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

When we did the primary research for our book Learning Family Business: Paradoxes and Pathways*, we talked to many owners of family businesses at different stages of the business life cycle. In the course of talking to them, we noticed that family business owners would say that their business was "just like any other business". But then they would always follow this with the word "except…" and then go on to describe something which suggests that family businesses are very unlike other businesses. This is not altogether surprising. After all, a family and a business are both systems that do …