John L. Ward

The Special Role of Strategic Planning for Family Businesses

Most family-owned businesses struggle to survive beyond a single generation. Strategic planning—for both business and family—can help to strengthen the family enterprise and extend its lifespan.

Culture in Family‐Owned Enterprises: Recognizing and Leveraging Unique Strengths

Through years of consulting experience and culture research, a fuller picture of family firms began to emerge. It became increasingly clear that family business sustainability and accomplishment were rooted in something deeper, something beyond superficial explanation. Belief in the innate value and uniqueness of family business culture drove collaboration on this project between the disciplines of family business and organizational behavior. The goal was to critically examine family business culture and performance relative to nonfamily firms. The Denison Organizational Culture Survey, a cultural assessment tool that has linked corporate culture to financial performance, was administered to a sample of 20 family businesses and 389 nonfamily businesses, allowing us to compare their cultures. The results showed that the corporate cultures of family enterprises were more positive than the culture of firms without a family affiliation. Family enterprises scored higher on all 12 dimensions of the assessment tool. Despite the small sample, several of these differences were statistically significant. This suggests that family firms perform better because of who they are. In addition, recent research that shows they also perform better because of what they do strategically. Their histories and shared identities provide a connectedness to time-tested core values and standards of behavior that lead to bottom-line success.

Is Strategy Different for the Family-Owned Business?

Little research has been conducted on family business strategy, even though a significant portion of the nations largest companies are family controlled. This article provides a framework for addressing strategy and proposes topics for research on family business strategy. Topics include mission, industry and situation analyses, global strategy, and strategy implementation.

Defining and Describing Family Business Ownership Configurations

This paper attempts to further family business research and theory by more thoroughly defining the stages of ownership configuration in family firms. In addition, these definitions are applied to a database of family firms to test the definitions and provide some insight into the make-up of U.S. family firms.

If Theories of Family Enterprise Really Do Matter, So Does Change in Management Education

This article focuses on family business as an emerging field within management studies. Drawing on a purposive sample of 10 articles presented at a recent academic conference as illustrative of current research in family business, we contend that one of the most salient implications for practice is management education. Subscribing to a logic that good scholarship should inform what is taught in business schools, the article further establishes family business as a field of study by developing a research–based heuristic useful for ongoing curriculum inquiry and development.

A Governance-Based Typology of Family Foundations: The Effect of Generation Stage and Governance Structure on Family Philanthropic Activities

This article brings together research on philanthropy, family business, and governance to examine patterns of giving by U.S. family versus nonfamily independent foundations. The authors use a sample comprising the 200 largest U.S. independent foundations in 2007 to show that family foundations are more focused in their grantmaking than nonfamily foundations. Board size moderates this relationship. They also offer a new typology of family foundations to show that the generation stage of the family and the foundation board’s composition are associated with different levels of grantmaking diversity in family foundations but in dissimilar ways. Scholarly and practical implications are discussed.

Evaluating Aggressive Marketing Strategies for Smaller‐share Firms

Empirical research on successful and unsuccessful marketing strategies indicates that smaller‐share firms in established markets have difficulty gaining market share profitability. An empirically based framework of questions to guide the managers of such firms when evaluating an aggressive marketing strategy they have under consideration is presented. A literature review of the prescriptions for smaller‐share firms basically suggests the two strategies of differentiation and/or focus on faster growing segments. The authors research of 31 case histories offers several more strategic recommendations for the management of smaller‐share firms.

Structuring International Financial Support for Climate Change Mitigation in Developing Countries

In the Copenhagen Accord of December 2009, developed countries agreed to provide start-up finance for adaptation in developing countries and expressed the ambition to scale this up to

Characteristics of Share-Gaining Marketing Strategies for Smaller-Share Firms: Literature Review and Synthesis

100 billion per year by 2020. The financial mechanisms to deliver this support have to be tailored to country and sector specific needs so as to enable domestic policy processes and self sustaining business models, and to limit policy risk exposure for investors while complying with budgetary constraints in OECD countries. This paper structures the available financial mechanisms according to the needs they can address, and reports on experience with their application in bilateral and multilateral settings.

A Conceptual Framework for Analyzing Marketing Strategy Cases

According to the literature, a successful share-gaining marketing strategy for a smaller-share firm is one which does not directly attack a large competitor, or does so only if the large competitor is vulnerable in some important way. If this necessary condition is satisfied, in order for the smaller-share firm’s marketing strategy to be successful it must also (1) neutralize the competition’s ability to respond quickly, (2) achieve a significant product/service difference, and (3) use a distribution strategy that will provide it with longer term protection against competitive retaliation.