A Next Generation Perspective on Governance and Leadership Transition

Thomas set up the family council with us we went to Harvard we took we took a course over several days we learned about the 3 circles and we ended up setting up a family council and a family assembly and in some ways when I sit through those meetings, you want it to be a safe place to articulate what you really want and in doing that sometimes it can create some emotional challenges or some misunderstandings along the way so in a lot of ways I wonder why Tom would even do that. When I think of an entrepreneurial mindset, a person's creating a company and a business for several reasons one of those reasons is to have some independence and really going through the succession planning from the original founder and entrepreneur it's like he’s starting to lose that and giving it all back to us And letting go of control and letting go of the finances and letting go of those thing, so through that it's been a journey I think we're working through it but it hasn’t been all easy and you set up a structure and there you go, problem solved it's really about the individuals working together. Things that I find interesting about our family council and it was one of the requirements even for me to want to be on the family council was that this wasn't our dad's council this is our family council and so on a family council you’re all equals and where you have a natural entrepreneur who is used to to directing and we’re used to submitting it creates a completely different platform for conversation which allows us to be much more vulnerable and sometimes that hurts and sometimes that's good but the platform of the family counsel for us has been very different than a board meeting or a typical strategy session and it allows us to deal with some of those issues that perhaps we wouldn't deal with if we didn't discipline ourselves to meet.