La Empresa Familiar Multigeneracional

The general aim of this work, “From the Founder to Multigenerational Family Business: The Family’s Crucial Role as an Owner for Longevity”, is to contribute in discovering the reasons why family businesses manage to survive. The conceptual approach taken as the starting point for this work, the information examined and the research methodology pursued by the authors involve criteria that are clearly different from those followed by the works from other scholars on the same topic. The conceptual approach taken here springs from the conviction that the basic key to understanding the success of a multigenerational family business lies in the qualities of the people who form the ownership group , and in this it coincides with Ward (2004) . Furthermore, when this personalist approach (given that it focuses on personal qualities) is used to study an organization, and there is no doubt that a family business is a complex organization , it involves another more implicit theory regarding what the individual is and how he/she will behave. In conceiving and developing the work that resulted in “From the Founder to Multigenerational Family Business”, we worked from the anthropological premise that views freedom as an individual’s principal quality and the ultimate basis for his or her dignity. From this one may directly conclude that one’s goal as a person must consist of improving one’s superior abilities (i.e. one’s intelligence, knowledge, and one’s free will) to the greatest possible extent, since these are abilities that will allow one to exercise true freedom. It follows, therefore, that wisdom and virtue are the greatest possessions that an individual can attain, an affirmation that has been inherent in general practical terms in expressions such as “it’s more important to be than to have” and “to have in order to be”.