ABSTRACT
As any observer, leader or change agent studies the ties of dependence and counter-dependence that link families and their businesses, the first impression is that of uniqueness. Families’ threads of history are drawn from the encounters and accidents of life that mark the memory of their members – a careful, biased, and often tacit mechanism of selection in which unexpected coincidences, special cases, and manifestations of power and status often take precedence over what is routine, common, or normal. Families are made of unique individuals, who through their particular interactions and relationships create an inimitable pattern of alliances, enmities, and connections that explain many of the real, also unique events, meetings, and predispositions that characterize the life cycle of the social system. In many families until today, economic factors related to money, property, work, and capital are tacitly forbidden to reach the collective imaginary and expelled from the explicit checkerboard of the language.
