Appointment Decisions: A Sense of Belonging and Drawing Limits

In presenting an inside view of the decision-making processes in business families, we should like to start with what is perhaps one of the most difficult tasks facing family strategy, namely, decisions regarding appointments. To some extent, the real art here is to strike a balance between the demands of bonding logic—the need for equality and equal treatment—and the requirements of decision-making logic to establish clear differences. The question of who is deemed to belong to the business family and shareholder group is important in this connection, but the structures used to secure affiliation are also vital, i.e. how contact, information and input are enabled. The issues under examination here are how appointments to positions and committees are made and how the boundaries that can develop between different branches of the family are addressed. We will constantly return to our image of the reversible figure introduced in the last chapter: questions are put to the family, and these are then answered differently by the family and by the business family.