Introduction to Fair Process

Listen to Christine Blondel explain the importance of using a fair process. As rising generations enter a family business, there are increasingly more owners who are looking to be a part of business processes. For the success of a family business, it is important that owners be engaged and work to achieve shared goals.

Well, fair process is very important. What is the essence of fair process? It’s that you focus more on the process than on the outcome. So a very big change that I think that we are witnessing is that in the past we tended to have a few owners and one of them was really leading the business and the others were just trusting. You know, trust me. And when they were asking questions, it was more like, “oh, you don’t trust me?”. But they were not really invited to participate, or to have views on the vision, etc. I think a big change that we are witnessing, first of all as generations pass, you may have more owners, from the Founder to his or her children, and then from the children to the cousins, so more people will actually be outside of the business but owning some shares. It is very important for them to be engaged, and fair process, what is says basically, is engage people that have an interest in the business.