All in the Family...Business

All in the Family… Business, one CEO's personal odyssey and candid memoir, is the classic case history of a single enterprise that represents the most numerous of all U.S. corporations, the family business. According to the foreword by a former Undersecretary of Commerce and Wharton Business School professor, 95 percent of American companies are privately owned—the vast majority of them as family businesses. Examining the dynamics of one family enterprise—particularly the problems of succession—All in the Family . . .Business is an important book and a valuable resource. It is also an intensely human story told with candor.

An old saying had it that the typical family business went "from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations." Thus, the first generation of a family starts a company; the second puts it on the map; the third leaves it, loses it or in some instances, destroys it. Here then is a story typical of family businesses, which have such special characteristics that "family business" has become a specialty in most business schools today.

In this case, George Raymond Sr. buys a little factory in upstate New York for $6,000 (with no money down), the precursor of The Raymond Corporation. He builds the business and manages to survive the Depression, keeping the local economy afloat to the lasting gratitude of his community. When his son George Jr. returns from World War II, he follows in father's footsteps, although with a very different stride, as he replaces autocratic methods with a more modern, participatory style of management, the then-innovative method called "organizational development." Decades later when George Jr. prepares to step down, his children are variously not ready, able or interested in taking over. For complex reasons, a bitter boardroom fight with outsiders ensues and when the dust clears, George Jr. forces the sale of the company out of the family's control. (It fetches $353 million.) The Raymond Corporation survives today as a premier manufacturer of forklifts, conveyors and other material handling equipment; but no longer a family firm, it is now part of the Toyota family of companies.

"Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," as Tolstoy famously wrote, and so too is every family business—though they have many intangible assets in common. Told with remarkable honesty, and leavened with self-deprecating humor, the story of George Raymond's corporation takes very special twists and turns because of the Raymond family itself, a clan possessing—and possessed by—special talents, strokes of genius, shortcomings and both ordinary and extraordinary experiences.

The Raymond family's complex history includes romantic serendipity and lasting marriages, painful decisions, and one horrendous tragedy, a murder. It involves cliff-hanging corporate strategies and a number of sad disconnects between generations. As D. Bruce Merrifield writes in the foreword, this narrative has much to teach: "It should be read and studied by every owner of a family firm, every student of business management, every scholar and teacher in a business school."