Most businesses would like to think that the future is being intricately planned and laid out in boardrooms and meetings. Decisions made at the highest level will shape what happens in years to come, and events will unfold in a precise and predetermined way. Of course, the world is not perfect in that way. Even so, when it comes to the next generation taking over a family business, a lot of thought goes into preparing anointed successors – familiarising them with company practice, educating them on business history and tradition, introducing them to and building their relationships with key contacts. This grooming is intended to ensure a smooth succession that serves the business well. But it is more complicated than assigning roles to individuals. What if the next generation are being influenced not in the boardroom or on the shopfloor, but in the living room and kitchen; not by deliberate exposure to business activities, but by everyday mundane activities that all families partake in, and which plant the seeds for the future? So much attention is placed on how succession in family businesses is shaped by business activities, it can be easy to ignore the other major factor – family life. As family and business interweave, some family practices might seem to have little to do with the business in the short-term but have the potential for long-term impact. Activities such as shopping, washing, and cooking may appear mundane, but they can shape social structures, relationships, and attitudes from a young age. These everyday practices can enable next generations to become successors in family businesses – even if it goes against the intentions of their parents. WHAT’S COOKING? We chose to look at how one such activity, cooking, can influence succession, and examined Sweet Mandarin, a company run by the next generation of a threegeneration family culinary business. Here, cooking is in embedded in both business and family life. Sisters Helen, Lisa, and Janet Tse started Sweet Mandarin in Manchester in 2004. They went against their parents’ wishes by quitting jobs in law, accounting and engineering to pursue their family legacy. The Tse family’s culinary business roots date back to their great-grandfather Leung migrating to the UK with his family from Guangzhou, China, in 1925, with their livelihood dependent on his home-recipe soy sauce. The sisters’ grandmother, Lily, started a Chinese restaurant in Liverpool, as an immigrant from Hong Kong, and their mother, Mabel, owns a Chinese takeaway. Mabel wanted her children to ‘integrate into UK society’, and they all entered white-collar trades, before leaving to start the restaurant. Between 2014 and 2016, the sisters wrote a collection of three cookbooks, pairing accounts of cooking together as a family with recipes. They include rich illustrations of stories, anecdotes, historical accounts, and family photos, and provide an account that spans more than 30 years – from the next generation’s childhood to eight years after Sweet Mandarin was set up. The books give a detailed insight into the three sisters’ reflection on their everyday engagement with cooking, and accounts of the intersections between family life and cooking practice. They allow us to observe the family cooking together without being there ourselves, and we can see how family practices have an unintentional influence on the next generation, strengthening their links to the family business through cooking. STARTING YOUNG As children, the sisters engaged in daily cooking, mixing family life with cooking, learning about their culture, and picking up life lessons. Cooking is all-inclusive for the family, something they do together every day, an inextricable part of their life, which in turn is from the family business. For the sisters, cooking was seen as a family duty. There was an obligation to work when friends could play. As Helen and Lisa describe: “Like our parents and their parents, [cooking] was a way of life and we simply didn’t know any different. All I knew was that we lived over the shop, ate from the shop, and worked in the shop.” Cooking is so intertwined with family life that it forms how the next generation know past family members, who speak of being ‘inspired… to launch our sauce business and keep the family dream alive’. Previous generations use cooking to teach their children important life lessons. You can see this in both good stories and bad within the books. For 48 |
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTI5NzM=