RECTIFYING THE ISSUE If family businesses are to address this imbalance, they need to try to introduce the necessary structures and policies. Family firm managers and consultants should consider strengthening the environmental pillar of their strategy to keep up with their competitors and become ‘green champions’. Doing so essentially means professionalising. Especially for small and medium-sized family firms, this can be challenging. Professionalisation means a change of culture. You have to stop behaving in a parochial way. Even if you hire people who have experience in sustainability, this does not always work well. The family wants to control the behaviour of these people. They do not always trust them, and the new structures do not work. Only by changing the culture can this succeed. A GREENER FUTURE Having a social impact is becoming increasingly important for family firms. Some of the larger entrepreneurial families have a family member whose role is to make sure that the family has a positive social impact as well as an economic one. A number of things are being increasingly adopted in family firms to strengthen the sustainability aspect. One example is what we call family spirituality. When a family practises family spirituality they prioritise collective interest over individual interest. This, in turn, has a positive effect on sustainability. This is where a family business can exploit the power of the next generation. If you speak with the next generation in family businesses, you see that for them sustainability is even more important than for their fathers and mothers. For them, trying to be sustainable is very important. When you have a family firm that is led by a younger generation family member, it is typically associated with higher care for the environment. We are in the middle of a huge generational transition in business. All the businesses that have been founded or inherited by the Baby Boomer generation are being passed over to Millennials. There are estimates saying a total wealth of around $84bn will be transferred. We are lucky to have this mass of next generation leaders who really take sustainability to heart. The more the next generation take over, the more sustainability will become part of the DNA of a family enterprise. FIFTY FOUR DEGREES | 53 Alfredo De Massis is a Professor at the University of Chieti-Pescara, at IMD in Switzerland, and at Lancaster University Management School. He is a former Director of the Centre for Family Business at Lancaster. The article Are Family Firms Green? by Professor Ivan Miroshnychenko, of the International Institute for Management Development (IMD), Lausanne; Professor Danny Miller, of HEC Montreal; Professor Alfredo De Massis; and Professor Isabelle Le Breton-Miller, of HEC Montreal, is published in Small Business Economics. The article Family Firms and Environmental Performance: A Meta-Analytic Review by Professor Ivan Miroshnychenko, of the Free University of BozenBolzano; Professor Alfredo De Massis; and Professors Roberto Barontini and Francesco Testa, of Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, is published in Family Business Review. The article Sustainability Practices of Family and Nonfamily Firms: A Worldwide Study, by Professor Ivan Miroshnychenko, of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, and Professor Alfredo De Massis, is published in Technological Forecasting and Social Change. a.demassis@lancaster.ac.uk
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