Shared Values in the Business and the Family

What are your family’s shared values and how do they relate to the business? Listen to Yuelin Yang discuss these questions as they relate to Asian business families.

I think in any family business what is important and critical is for the family as a whole to come up with a set of common values that they all subscribe to, and then the values will then carry over to the business side. But sometimes you can run into various areas of conflict that we’re seeing here. I think that probably in Asia there could be more that type of open discussion, it tends to still be very suppressed, particularly if a patriarch is involved, I’m not sure if all Asian families quite have their values together yet, because often it’s the patriarch and maybe a few other members in the business but I think it’s a growing trend in Asia where families are coming together and saying what are our shared values as a family and then how do those shared values impact and carry over to the business? First of all they need to have that discussion in terms of what are their shared values, obviously they are a collection of individuals but what are their shared values, and as those values relate to the business, and then try to strike the right balance between the family values vs. the business necessities and try to optimize it which it sounds like they will be doing.