I recently finished listening to the pretty slapdash Dynasties, which is David Landes' take on family businesses, beginning with the Barings and Rothschilds, and ending with the Toyodas and Fords.  His thesis, to the extent that a historian is ever willing to claim such a thing (sometimes I wonder if in history workshops it's a race to get your hand up first so that you can be the one to say "actually, I think it is a little more complicated than your account would have it") is that family businesses can matter.  Not that they persist in unique ways, or that they are more likely to take long term, rather than short term views on investment or whatever, or that they usually decline through the generations.  Just: check out all the family businesses out there.  Not much to build a book around, things proceed through a series of pretty surface oriented profiles of various family CEOs, where we learn whether they had affairs, drank a lot, and often how they felt about religious minorities.

Anyway, the book is more about that sort of bland gossip than it is about business.  I can't really recommend it.  But I can leave you with this interesting factoid: a third of the Fortune 500 is family controlled.

Books | Bookmark

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8345157d569e200e008ceb67e8834

Links to weblogs that reference Business Dynasties:

1. Posted by family law sydney on September 11, 2011 @ 23:07 | Permalink

2. Posted by Hermes Kelly on November 18, 2011 @ 8:01 | Permalink

3. Posted by business consultant on February 1, 2012 @ 0:03 | Permalink