An exercise to think about your business differently

Have you ever heard a manager refer to their team as “one big happy family”? It’s a cliché, for sure, and also doesn’t acknowledge the fact that many families (and many businesses for that matter) display some level of dysfunction. But take that family analogy for a minute and consider your company for the purpose of this exercise:

Imagine that your main stakeholders were your family and the people you cared about most and ask yourself these questions:

• If this company belonged to my family, would I be making the same decisions?
• If I were planning to keep this company growing to hand off to my loved ones, would I be allocating resources differently?
• Would I have a different management structure if this business were family-owned?

Now consider why you may do things differently, and whether you should make changes in your business based on that.

This exercise is…