"Family businesses are the archetype of all business activities. Since family businesses provide even today about 70 percent of all jobs in Germany, most people know these structures from their own experience," writes Jon Baumhauer, the chief executive of the family holding of the Merck Group, in his Preface to this volume. The special thing about family businesses is that the persons involved are simultaneously members of family and firm. These two systems overlap with their very different emotional and rational logic, and sometimes put their decisionmakers in situations that are impossible to solve and have the quality of true paradoxes. This circumstance is a great challenge to both the family and the company and sometimes exposes both to such unreasonable and untenable demands.The goal of this volume is to illuminate the interaction of family, shareholders and company from various perspectives and to ask questions that can help the reader to better understand the complexity with which the parties concerned are confronted.
