Welcome to “FWIW (For What It’s Worth),” a candid advice column about the triumphs, trials and everything in between of running a family business. Rooted in real-world experience and a deep appreciation for the unique challenges family businesses face, this column offers insights that are well-intentioned, practical and sometimes a little unconventional. Need some guidance on a family business issue? You can anonymously submit a question to Jamie right here.
Dear FWIW,
What’s the hardest part of your job?
Sincerely,
Anonymous
Dear Anonymous,
From the psychological (imposter syndrome, self-worth, enmeshment) to the strategic (prioritization, difficult conversations, navigating ambiguity), there is no shortage of challenges in operating your family’s business, or any business for that matter! For me, the hardest part of my job is something more fundamental and more pervasive: It’s having to straddle two worlds, simultaneously.
You may think I would have figured out this “straddling” act by now. After all, as a female working in a male-dominated industry and as a first-generation Indian-American, I’ve been having to adapt my identity depending on the room I’m in my whole life. Now, as a next generation leader in my family’s business, I’ve added the new dimension of living in constant tension between honoring the extraordinary foundation my parents built while finding the courage to innovate, change and do things fundamentally differently.
We’ve heard the saying, “What got you here won’t get you there.” And, while I believe it’s often true, in a family business, it’s rarely the whole story. There are more times than I’d like to admit that I’ve been humbled by judging what, on the surface, felt like nonsensical practice in our business, only to find out that there was a method to my dad’s madness. John Ward’s work, “Unconventional Wisdom: Counterintuitive Insights for Family Business Success,” is a sobering and refreshing reminder for eager NextGens like me that it doesn’t always have to make sense to make cents. A classic example: many family businesses tend to avoid debt, while classic business school education teaches us to increase leverage for better returns. Yet, it is in part because of the lack of debt that family businesses have more stable returns and ultimately outperform and outlast their non-family counterparts.
This is what family business scholars Amy Schuman, Stacy Stutz and John Ward call the “power of paradox” in their book, “Family Business as Paradox.” When most people think about paradox they become paralyzed by unsolvable problems, unmanageable tensions and impossible trade-offs. But the authors radically argue that the multitude of paradoxes at the heart of family business (stability and change, tradition and innovation, loyalty and performance) aren’t a liability. They are the source of competitive advantage. Unlike private-equity backed or publicly traded companies locked into maximizing shareholder return based strictly on profitability metrics, family businesses define shareholder value through a personal lens by recognizing that you can have your proverbial cake and eat it, too.
Leonard Lauder understood this intuitively. When asked in a November 2023 Wall Street Journal interview whether he resented his mother Estée always working, he didn’t hesitate. “Not at all,” he said. “Work was love.” For the Lauders, the boundary between family and business wasn’t a source of conflict. Instead, it was a source of meaning. Work was family. Family was work. That integration, rather than separation, is what allowed them to build something that outlasted any single generation. When I read this quote for the first time, it felt liberating. For so long, I felt I had to choose either/or. Suddenly, I had permission to accept both.
Capitalizing on this advantage is no small feat: it requires creativity, acceptance and humility. Most importantly, it requires us to stop seeing the tension as something to overcome. It turns out, the hardest part of my job is also the greatest opportunity: permission to hold two contradictory ideas at once and to find power in both.
For What It’s Worth,
Jamie