VALUES A modern fable about a Swiss man who single-handedly planted a forest reveals a profound truth: the best companies are those that think about future generations, writes Randel Carlock
Family business is a challenge because families are about emotions and businesses are about financial performance – not a likely formula for a successful partnership. Yet, despite this apparent conflict in purposes, many family businesses create a competitive advantage based on stewardship by aligning their concern for family emotions while acting professionally to deliver business performance.
Family business stewardship, like any value, is hard to describe, but, in simple terms, it is about leaving your family and business in a better condition than when you inherited it. Obviously this can mean financially, but for many business families it is also about the family’s legacy, the quality of their emotional connections and maybe a spiritual dimension of service to others.
Perhaps the best way to explore stewardship is to consider a short story entitled The Man Who Planted Trees. This is clearly not a business case study or even about family business. Its author, the French writer Jean Giono, was never even clear as to whether it was fact or fiction. He claimed instead that it was a modern fable. Indeed, since he first published it back in 1954 the short story has been translated into all major languages and turned into an Oscar-winning animated film.
The Man Who Planted Trees is a parable about one person’s commitment to make the world a better place for future generations. His reward was not personal recognition or financial gain but rather the challenge of his work and the opportunity to use his simple talents for good purposes. The current economic and environmental challenges the world faces make the story a powerful metaphor because planting trees and businesses could quite literally save our planet.
There are particularly powerful lessons for business families in this story. The stewardship behaviours of focusing on the future, continuous learning and sustainability, combined with the entrepreneurial determination to do something that had never been done before, enabled Bouffier to transform the arid countryside into a thriving landscape. Without any thought of personal recognition or financial gain, the shepherd-turned-forester moved tirelessly across the countryside, selecting and planting the best trees for the different soil and landscapes. In short, this it is a story about what can happen when stewardship is the guiding principle.
Jean Giono’s story also helps us to focus on the importance of the human dimension to family businesses as they transition across generations. Multi-generational business families face a difficult challenge of maintaining healthy family connections because of the natural tendency for wealth and power to interfere with meaningful human relationships. Stewardship values can help hold a business family together by providing a roadmap for transforming the founder’s beliefs into a meaningful guide for future generations.
The most important factors to the first-generation entrepreneur are his or her values and vision of what the business can become. Stewardship values shared by a family strongly support the founder-entrepreneur’s personal values of long-term thinking and ownership continuity. They enable multi-generational business families to commit their talents and resources to professionalising how they work together in developing strategies, investing human and financial capital, and governing their performance.
Examples of how stewardship values and behaviours can be expressed in family business actions can take many different forms, for example: planning based on family values and goals; teaching the next generation about the responsibilities of ownership; supporting family education and talent development; investing capital in the business to support sustainable growth; developing and selecting the most capable leaders; planning and discussing ownership transitions; encouraging family participation and commitment in family activities; contributing family talents and resources to philanthropy; developing sound family agreements to prevent conflicts; using governance to take decisions and improve accountability; considering the interests of all stakeholders served by the family business.
The 21st century is a new era of global opportunity – particularly for family businesses – because families that combine stewardship values based on professional practices create a competitive advantage that cannot be matched by widely traded firms. These “best” family businesses outperform their listed competitors because they lead, plan and govern based on stewardship values. Their planning is for future generations not the next 90 days; their strategy is driven by value creation for their family and stakeholders, not just the shareholders and their governance is focused on sustainability and accountability.
The family and business unity of purpose around stewardship can help ensure that business families lead firms that perform in the marketplace and, most importantly, create families that are connected by service and caring.
THE MAN WHO PLANTED TREES
Exactly a century ago, on the bare contours of the southern French Alps, one man began to plant trees.
Elzéard Bouffier had been a farmer in the lowlands, but – after the death of his wife and only son – he withdrew to the mountains with his sheep. He had a simple purpose: to bring the withered landscape back to life by populating it with trees.
Bouffier spent his days planting acorns and his evenings sorting through the next batch of seeds, selecting only the best. He also started to introduce other species, such as beech and birch. Over three years, he planted 100,000 seeds in total. Of these, only one-fifth produced seedlings. And he knew that only half of these again would survive. But that would still leave 10,000 trees – growing in a place where once there had been nothing.
The years went by and with them the Great War. Elzéard Bouffier continued his single-minded pursuit. By now the first oaks were as tall as a man and the beech trees shoulder high. In the valleys birch thickets were thriving and water ran in the beds of streams that had been dry throughout living memory. Little by little, as the years went by, wildlife returned to the landscape: first flowers and willow trees, then hare and wild boar. No one yet suspected that man, let alone one single man, was responsible for this apparent miracle of nature. And still Bouffier continued – with no recognition, yet much adversity.
One year he planted more than 10,000 maples, all of which died. But the rest of the forest flourished to the point that he now had to walk 12km from his house to plant new beech trees. Bouffier was 75 years old and had almost forgotten how to talk, such was his solitary lifestyle.
When the Second World War broke out, his work was briefly in jeopardy. Some of the trees were cut down for much-needed fuel, but the forest was so remote that it soon became apparent that felling them was uneconomical. Bouffier continued planting, just as he had through the First World War. By the time a distant peace was declared in 1945, he was 87. He died in hospital two years later.
During the last years of the old man’s life, a wise forestry officer had come to realise that the trees had not sprung up spontaneously. He had, unbeknown to Bouffier, assigned some of his staff to protect the young forest. At around the same time, families had begun to return to the abandoned farms and villages. Water became plentiful, as the trees retained the snow and the people learnt how to channel streams. Crops of all kinds grew abundantly.
Elzéard Bouffier left behind him not only a forest of thousands of trees, but a community of nearly 10,000 men, women, and children. His once bleak mountainside lived happily – if not ever after – right up to the present day.
