To paraphrase an old Broadway musical title, “A Funny Thing Happened to Me on the Way to the Airport.” I realized that my visit to South America—one part wedding celebration in Lima, Peru, and one part business meetings in São Paulo, Brazil—had re-introduced me to la familia. I don’t mean la familia as the Spanish translation for the English word “family.” That would be the equivalent of defining a rainbow as a collection of colors. Rather, I mean that extraordinarily vibrant and colorful phenomenon of family that makes the American family look like a faded black-and-white photograph by comparison.
I realized on my last day in Brazil just how high a price we Americans have paid to build a culture premised so exclusively on the individual. In the U.S., prestige, self-esteem and personal satisfaction are all primarily rooted in individual achievement. Our dominant cultural myths acclaim Daniel Boone, the lone frontiersman; Horatio Alger, the embodiment of the self-made man; and Bill Gates, paradigm of technological entrepreneurship.
Walt Disney never lionized the pioneering families that endured lives of incredible hardship to build communities; he gave us Davy Crockett. Americans’ current reading includes The New New Thing, the paean to Silicon Valley’s most anti-authoritarian curmudgeon, Jim Clark.
My journey to South America took me to a place where identity is rooted in family and where real relationships haven’t been reduced to e-mail connections over the Internet. Imagine life in Lima, where I joined 18 entrepreneurs who have met for lunch (lasting three hours) every Friday for 22 years; and where a bride and groom danced all night at their wedding celebration for 600 and returned the next two days for formal farewell lunches with each of their extended families before leaving on their honeymoon.
Consider the budding Internet entrepreneur and his wife who dine at his grandparents’ home most Sundays with his extended family. Welcome to la familia in Lima, where people are enriched by their extended families and by their intense friendships as often as Americans take their daily vitamins.
Now journey from this five-day matrimonial festival in Lima—a city of 8 million perched on 300-foot cliffs overlooking the Pacific, where the streets are still swept by hand each day— to São Paulo, a city of nearly 20 million, whose skyscrapers rival those of any major city. Brazil’s economy was about 70% state-controlled until three decades ago. Today it bristles with entrepreneurial success—that is, with family business success.
Compared to the U.S. market, very few large Brazilian companies are publicly owned. Most are family-controlled and private. In the space of just three decades these family-controlled enterprises have catapulted Brazil into the ranks of the world’s economic giants. While many of the Brazilians I met openly discussed the need for these family-controlled grupos to adopt better management practices, no one seemed in any way self-conscious that family control of business enterprise was anything but normal.
Brazil bustles with private equity funds, with insurance companies funding succession plans, and with lawyers and accountants advising family firms. Many business practices there may change under the influence of American advisers, especially after younger generations of Brazilian business families return home from U.S. business schools. But what won’t change is the power of the Brazilian family.
This renewable resource of shared values seems far more likely to buttress the continuity of entrepreneurial families and the businesses they control than most American families, whose energy is depleting like domestic oil production.
As American family firms in particular anticipate global competition as a primary challenge to their continued viability, they might consider which task is more difficult: teaching corporate finance to a Paulista (a citizen of São Paulo) or teaching the importance of relationships to an American business school graduate.
Richard Narva is co-founder of Genus Resources, a Boston family business consulting firm (Rnarva@genusresources.com).