ABSTRACT
Families and owners, as they grow their business, innovate and maintain a vision for their ownership. We will shortly describe the tasks in this process. For example, they seek new opportunities and start moving towards realizing them. They focus on entrepreneurship, and consolidate it into a business. These capacities and tasks create cycles of renewal and growth. When the business has developed, the family accumulates the advantages that business success creates. For example, sending their children to better schools and gaining new networks will eventually be used to increased advantage for the business. In some cases, the accumulated advantage extends to creating synergies and win-win arrangements between the local community, the family and their businesses. Managing these capacities concurrently are complex and challenging. We found that within a family, different members would be preoccupied with focus and argue for the importance of these different tasks. The family discussions would be concerned with the intrinsic tensions in trying to accommodate all of them and bringing them forward in a strategic manner.
