ARTICLES 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. Strategic planning for family-owned businesses differs from planning for other types of companies largely because the family firm must incorpo-rate family issues into its thinking. Family concerns and preferences can influence the choice of busi-ness strategy and often make the family reluctant to embrace more formal goal-oriented discussions and decisions. Further, family considerations can limit the strategic aggressiveness of the family firm. While our research revealed several reasons for this hesitation among family businesses, it also pointed to the critical need for strategic planning and the special benefits to those who undertake it. That research consisted of three studies of strategy in family firms. Ward (1987) has detailed information on this research. In the first study, 200 privately owned firms that were at least five years old and that employed at least twenty people in 1924 were selected at random from the Illinois Manufacturers Directory. (The year 1924 was selected because 1919 was the earliest date of meaningful data.) Interviews at the surviving firms in 1984 documented the family ownership and leadership succes-sion patterns and the evolution of the companies ' strategies. The second study compared the strategies and results of firms that were closely held or family-controlled with the strategies and results of public firms not controlled by families. For this study, we subdivided th