Management Consulting in Family Businesses

In today's global business environment, the intense competition, the changing and uncertain conditions, and the increasing customer's requirements are challenges for the companies' operational efficiency and profitability. In this context, companies highlight the importance of supply chain design and its holistic understanding in order to achieve and sustain competitive strengths. This book analyses supply chains as complex systems, whose performance is characterized by their structural configuration and emergent behaviour. The author analyses the supply chain structure and behaviour within the scope of complexity science. He focuses on supply chain complexity by means of a literature review and an empirical research, which give insights into the impact of complexity on supply chain performance. Moreover, within this book the supply chain is modelled as a complex system by considering the non-linear relationships of its geo-positioned elements. Finally, an agent based model is developed for the generic supply chain simulation, which allows assessing the impact of complexity on supply chain performance and characterizing the behaviour of supply chain designs. Many family businesses refrain from using management consultants to support their strategic decision making. But why do some of them use consultants? And what are the reasons not to use management consultants? This book highlights under which conditions consultants are seen to be helpful and when they are rejected. It researches the use of management consultants in family businesses from different perspectives of organizational boundary research. Family businesses vary from each other. Family generation of owner & management, family influence, goal divergence among owners, and complexity are important dimensions that distinguish family businesses in their use of management consultants. This book helps family business managers and owners to understand when the use of management consultants is beneficial to them and when they should refrain from using consultants. Furthermore, it supports management consultants in tailoring their support to specific family business situations. This research is based on an innovative paper-based conjoint experiment with top managers of large German family businesses analyzing more than 1,700 decisions to use management consultants.