ABSTRACT
The du Pont family business made a quantum leap that day by the mill pond in 1804 when it installed the Hercules turbine. The field of family business studies has focused primarily on the business organization. The goal was protecting the “goose that lays the golden egg.” Business families seeking expert advice on best practices learned to define and manage the drivers of the organization’s success. The prevalent way of thinking about family business used to be, “organizations before innovators.” Even when examining many of the great, top-down, non-family business organizations, family business experts had already noticed evidence of a quality that makes family business so unique: the emphasis on fairness as a defining cultural characteristic. To succeed in the New Digital Age, family organizations need to mirror their distributed counterparts.
