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The curious business of families in business.

At K.C. Irving's house in Saint John some four decades ago, the Christmas dinners that he and his wife, Harriet, hosted were no small affairs. Their sons, Jim, Art and Jack showed up with their wives and children, including those who would one day be masters of the family's amazing-and amazingly long-lived-industrial empire. Eight adults, maybe nine children, and one mighty turkey.

"Invariably, a telephone call came in," remembered James D. Irving, son of Jim. "Mrs. Jones, or somebody, had run out of stove oil, and my grandfather took that call himself. Everything stopped. The turkey just sat there." Having assured Mrs. Jones she'd get her oil, K.C. phoned Irving to place a delivery order. Half an hour later, everything stopped again while K.C. called her back to make sure she received her oil.

Thus, he did not just tell his grandchildren but showed them that nothing-not even Christmas Day-was as important as giving good service to a loyal customer. I recalled this story while reading Managing for the Long Run: Lessons in Competitive Advantage from Great Family Businesses (2005). I came upon a passage about the children in the families that own Nordstrom department stores, the Michelin tire company, Estée Lauder cosmetics, and Cargill Inc., the world's leading grain trader.

"The Nordstrom, Michelin, Lauder and Cargill kids spent decades at the feet of their parents-in the office and the living room-all the while absorbing a passion for the mission and company," wrote Danny Miller, a strategy professor at a Montreal business school, and his wife, Isabelle Le Breton-Miller, a researcher at the University of Alberta. "The result: Family members feel not that the business belongs to them, but that they belong to the business, and that they must prove themselves worthy of the association."

The family behind floor-wax manufacturer S.C. Johnson & Son has similar traditions. Sam Johnson, his wife and four children discussed the business regularly, and little Helen Johnson was still in Grade 5 when she began to suggest new products over dinner. Ingvar Kamprad, head of IKEA International, explained deals with suppliers to his sons and took them to far-flung corners of the business.

None of this would strike any descendant of K.C. Irving as unusual. While his boys were still in short pants, K.C. routinely took them to his office on the Saint John waterfront, his bus depots, bus-assembly plant, plywood factory, sawmill, his general store in Bouctouche. When the boys became fathers themselves, they immersed their own offspring in the family's industries, just as K.C. had immersed them.

"When grandfather, father, Art and Jack got together, nobody talked baseball or hockey," James D. Irving said. "It was all business. Or politics that surrounded business. Or information that all related back, in some fashion, to business. Business was their lives."

Managing for the Long Run shows that, despite the widespread belief that family-owned companies are congenitally inefficient, they often beat the pants off corporations whose shares all trade on stock markets. L.L. Bean, Levi Strauss, Motorola and Hallmark Cards not only outperform their non-family-owned rivals, but far out-survive them. Why? "The business represents a treasured institution that is intended to sustain the family, employees, and other stakeholders into the future," Managing for the Long Run says. "It is something to nurture, not a holding to be sold for a fast capital gain or exploited in order to draw a fat paycheck."

Some might sneer at the notion that love has any place in Big Business, but not Jack Irving. When he was 70 he told me that during the Christmas seasons of his boyhood, his father took his sons to Irving forests in Northern New Brunswick, and they'd all walk together on frozen rivers. How fond Jack was of that ancient memory!

If it's a family that owns the Big Business, love certainly plays a part in its surviving good times and bad-for generation, after generation, after generation. And a very merry Christmas to you, too.

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