The crab bucket. Put one crab in a bucket and it climbs out. Put in five and none of them does. Family firms run on that instinct, and it has never cost more: a hundred trillion dollars changes hands over the next twenty-five years, and the generation receiving it is the best prepared the sector has ever had.
More than 70 per cent of them see AI as a chance to transform the business. Almost half of family firms have not begun to explore it. Only 39 per cent of business families believe their culture is ready. And a mentor for the successor, the cheapest item in the whole succession design, remains one of the rarest.
This episode is about redesigning the bucket rather than removing it. Rules written with rigour instead of affection. Mentors who reach a hand down. Territory of their own, where the next generation leads on what you do not command. Whoever is pulling in your family council almost always means well, and that is what makes it invisible.
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