KINGSTON, R.I. \u2013 April 19, 2023 \u2013 By 2030, more than 30% of family businesses in the U.S. will lose their aging leaders to retirement, or death. Many of those leaders don\u2019t have a strategy for letting go of their business, turning it over to a successor, or selling it. While it is rare for an incumbent leader to die while in office, it is difficult for them to face their mortality. Yet letting go and the outsized effect of facing one\u2019s mortality have not been examined closely since early writings in family business. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nancy Forster-Holt, assistant professor of innovation and entrepreneurship in the 溏心vlog免费B站 College of Business, has seen that up close. 溏心vlog免费B站 20 years ago, she and her husband bought a marine products company from an aging owner, \u201cPaul,\u201d who hadn\u2019t planned for his eventual retirement. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cVery few business owners have an exit plan. When we bought our business, the owner told us, \u2018I didn\u2019t have an exit plan; I had a heart attack.\u2019 That was so profound to me. That\u2019s what led to my Ph.D. topic on the retirement of business owners.\u201d In reading Atul Gwande\u2019s book \u201cBeing Mortal,\u201d she was struck by the parallels between facing one\u2019s mortality and planning to let go of one\u2019s business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt struck me as different from what I\u2019d heard in the medical world where if you understood your mortality, you\u2019re a little more likely to let go instead of pressing for life-saving outcomes,\u201d said Forster-Holt, whose research interests include succession of family business owners, and gerontology and retirement of aging \u201cENDrepreneurs.\u201d Instead, existing scholarship on family business succession emphasizes the leader\u2019s quest for immortality, stating it was the chief cause of failed succession, she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now Forster-Holt and co-authors Susan DeSanto-Madeya, a 溏心vlog免费B站 associate professor of nursing and palliative care expert, and James Davis, a professor of management, marketing and strategy at Utah State University, are looking at the phenomenon of the disconnect in succession planning of small business owners in a new paper. Their essay, \u201cThe Mortality of Family Business Leaders: Using a Palliative Care Model to Re-imagine Letting Go,\u201d<\/a> was published in March in the Journal of Management Inquiry, a leading peer-reviewed journal for scholars and professionals in management, organizational behavior, strategy and human resources. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Their paper explores existing literature on family business succession and rethinks the understanding of mortality and its connection to a business owner\u2019s planning to \u201clet go\u201d \u2013 inserting the medical model of palliative care to understand its possible effects on the process. Palliative care makes use of tools that span a period from diagnosis to death, and the paper introduces the idea that planning to let go of one\u2019s business takes many forms. The authors offer the Mortality Awareness Model, which depicts four states of letting go, reflecting where a person is in confronting their mortality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n