Managing Leadership^®

It is fashionable these days to lament – not merely globalization – but the changing face of commerce here in the US. We complain that the franchises and branches of major corporations that serve our daily needs have taken from us not merely the friendly face of the neighborhood family business, but are undermining the very bedrock of American culture. The family farmer, for example, has been celebrated as the backbone of American society since the days of our Founding Fathers, and remains a hot-button (and highly-subsidized) figure in politics today.

Indeed, we all tend to wax nostalgic about the halcyon old days when we knew everyone in the neighborhood and we didn’t have to lock our doors. Knowing a family meant we knew what everyone in it was doing because one’s livelihood was part and parcel of family tradition. However, while we’re lamenting the passing of the corner grocer, the neighborhood hardware store, and the family physician, as consumers, we are helping to consign them to the past.

Why? Because many family businesses, by today’s standards, are inefficient, expensive, and insufficiently responsive to our various and changing needs as consumers. Not so long ago, family businesses were not simply a traditional element of life and society, they were a necessary vehicle for developing, maintaining, and transmitting expertise in a given calling. They were a logical part of the technological level of the market system of suppliers and consumers, and of the information processing between and among them that existed at the time.

Today, however, information systems are such that in the farm business, for example, information can be better developed, maintained, and transmitted in a corporate, than in a family, environment – and new developments in farming science and technology can be more efficiently obtained and disseminated. Market information can be better gathered, and even manipulated, by corporations than by families. And technological advances permit economies of scale in both production and distribution that provide immense benefits in price and choice to the consumer that can’t be matched by the family farm.

The idyllic scene of a father passing along wisdom and experience to a son, the generational extension of cultural bonds, is a powerful image which speaks not merely of our nostalgia for the old days, but of our ill-defined sense that our gains from our uniquely individualistic version of market economic culture come at a cost.

But what would be the cost of returning to such an age? Surely, we should acknowledge that calls for a return to the days of the colorful, quaint diversity of local shops with home-made wares, whose proprietors and customers know each others’ needs and tolerate each others’ eccentricities are themselves an elitist indulgence that would cater to the whims of the wealthy while keeping the poor in a kind of feudal poverty. Those days had their time; they have passed.

The issue isn’t how we can go back, but how we can go forward meaningfully – how we can continue to transmit our culture, and not just our (management and otherwise) science, generationally in rewarding and constructive ways. The genius of human society is that we always come to find these values unobtrusively but unavoidably woven into the fabric of our everday lives, whatever pattern we may find them taking as time goes on.

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