From Dependence to Inter-Dependence

Listen to Christine as she explains how the rising generation moves from dependence to inter-dependece. In a family business, it can be beneficial to allow the rising generation to be independent before working in the business. By gaining individual experience, the next generation can develop confidence in their abilities, as well as confidence in their desire to work in the family business.

So I think one of the challenges of the rising generation with the wealth of opportunities that the world offers, with all the globalization, is that they have tons of opportunities out there and the question is, “shall I go back to the family business in my country, or shall I try a lot of other things elsewhere?”. And I would like to link it to the development process of people. We start when we are born being completely dependent on our parents. Then we become counter-dependent, that’s the adolescence, the teenager, but much before it’s already the two years old, and it may happen again in other stages of our lives. We want to do things ourselves, so we just push our parents back, and then we become independent. So we do our own stuff. We are fine with the others, but we do our own stuff. And it’s once we have been through these phases then we become interdependent, we can inter-write with other people at another level. Well, maybe we need to have been independent before we can be interdependent.