Rockefeller said (roughly): good business makes good friendships, good friendships makes bad business.
There are so many possible risk scenarios not discussed in that essay. It does take more maturity, healthy relationship skills and good communication to work with existing people in your life. But that's fine, we should develop those skills anyway.
It's perfectly possible that a CEO could be 'happy' while his/her friends quietly remain unhappy.
In a way, a company failing could be the best outcome for friends and family getting hired -- everyone tried together and bonded in the crash. The worst could be a quality exit, in which your friend is enriched at 10-100x the amount you are. It's hard to stay friends with someone who just worked you hard for n years and then made 100x the money off the experience.
Interesting comment re: the best outcome being failure. I could see failure as going terribly for family/friend relationships. People are often at their most stressed in situations where their economic stability is threatened, and stress generally leads to conflict, in my experience.
The biggest challenge would be encouraging growth with people outside of your base.
You become a $50m company, and the young manager you hired is turning out to be better than your sister/brother/wife/husband... are you ready to replace one of those people with an outside person?
As an outside individual I tend to be wary of working for a family run business because the chances are that I will never be able to replace the owner's wife/brother/sister/husband, instead my maximum growth will be the tier below the family.
This is true of a lot of founders of companies though. A lot of times the person who is the most invested in leadership for the early success of a company is not necessarily the best person to lead the company in the long term. Zuckerberg is probably the most noticed, recent example: he lead Facebook to the top of the social networking scene, but now investors are scared of him.
Objectivity is something you always need in business.
Sure, objectivity is good, but often times difficult decisions have no objectively clear optimal path (eg. there are many good arguments to be made for why MZ should not be replaced, and even time will only evaluate a single path). Emotion has been a useful (though admittedly fallible) cognitive shortcut for our species in those situations.
I wouldn't be worried about the effect on the business so much as the effect on the personal relationships. I'm sure working with friends and family is no worse for the business, and in many cases better, for the business.
If your life is your business, fine, but I would hate for my working life to invade my personal life to such a degree.
I understand your feelings on this, but I suspect that depends upon the degree to which someone is able to compartmentalize and multi-task. Having a work life and a personal life doesn't have to be an either/or proposition, even if you work for people you know. I freely acknowledge that it's not for everyone, however if you have the ability to structure your life properly, it can work wonderfully for both parties.
One of the biggest pluses would be the personality aspect. You can interview and hire someone with a stellar resume and great interview skills, however you cannot truly know their personality until you work with them, and personality is one of the things that can make or break a working relationship. As the article touched upon, you often better know the strengths and weaknesses of those closest to you. This allows you to find the best fit for someone's personality and skills, which benefits everyone. Additionally, your friends and family are likely to give their absolute best effort because they're not just a part of your business, they're a part of your life. That's not always the case I know, as I'm sure we've all heard horror stories of friends and family who have taken advantage of such opportunities. But implementing the steps outlined would aid in preventing such situations, or in remedying them quickly should they arise.
> I suspect that depends upon the degree to which someone is able to compartmentalize and multi-task.
Well yes, it depends on your ability to compartmentalize. The problem is that it depends on your friends' and family's ability to compartmentalize just as much. I know I would be able to handle my wife complaining about my work and keep that out of my personal life. I have much less faith that if I had to sit down and have a "serious talk" with my brother, he wouldn't hold anything against me personally.
When relationships are on the line, it's not all about you. What might not faze you, might still throw a wrench into things for other people, and the end result is just as damaging.
I have hired nearly all of my best friends (and even my girlfriend), and a large part of me regrets it; and yes: for the very reasons you describe (personal, not business).
I have had to fire friends, and I have had to negotiate with them. I actually have managed to keep these people as close friends, but it got really tough going at times. :(
The thing that got really really hard for me, though, is that I no longer really just have "friends" in the sense of "someone you can tell your problems to".
Here is an example: let's say work sucks, or things are going badly in some negotiation, or maybe you literally jut hate your job that day and feel like going off on a massive "I wish I could just quit all of this" rant.
It no longer works to do this with your friends: they now have both emotional and economic incentives to argue with you, become frustrated at your opinions, or, even worse, themselves feel bad about their own lives.
In the other direction, I often feel the need to avoid hanging out with some of the people I most cherish in my life, as I know if I do they will ask after the status of something I should have done, or start asking me questions about something they should do.
The result is that I'm, in a way, not even allowed to have work/life separation anymore: whereas I'm totally fine with the idea "this is just dinner, can we not talk about work?", it is nearly impossible to get everyone else to abide.
I therefore have actually been quite happy as some of my friends have gotten larger jobs elsewhere (I really was mostly doing extreme part-time hiring as contractors) as I now can interact with them "normally".
(Now, that all said, I also feel I have seen this "work better" in a previous company I was a part of, but I can't help but wonder if it was because I was the employee as opposed to the employer.)
(I don't really hear my friends complaining about this interaction, for example; that said, maybe they just wouldn't tell me, due to this very same underlying bug.)
> I wouldn't be worried about the effect on the business so much as the effect on the personal relationships.
Yep. Would you sue a friend if he doesn't pay back borrowed money? Doing business means accepting inevitable business constraints. Constraints that are at odds with friendship.
My older brother admits he likes working with me and would do it again... now I have it in writing!
It is incredible how many people hear about our team which includes quite a few family members and say they can't imagine working with their brother (or sister, cousin, or whatever) but it works well for us. I can't imagine it any other way.
This is a very YMMV post. Everyone's family/friend situation is different, as is the type of business you're heading into.
Personally I'd rather befriend those that I work with to avoid mixing contexts. But then again I'm very particular about the way I conduct my business and how I get things done. Ultimately when you hire friends and family, you're bringing the social contracts into a different atmosphere. If I hire a friend as a programmer, I'm somewhat socially obligated to listen to his advice about taxes, whereas I have no obligations to a stranger that I hire for that purpose. The absolute worst thing is to ask your significant other for advice on a topic that they know little about, then having to pretend that you're considering it.
I disagree, this is a 'I haven't been in a car wreck so I see no value in seat belts' kind of story.
Friends is one thing, family is another. There is a reason every single HR boiler plate policies binder has a section which prohibits members of the same family from having a reporting relationship with each other.
I think that part of the reason why working with your friends and family gets a bad name, is that when it goes wrong, it goes spectacularly wrong. So even if it might be successful a decent percentage of the time, the fear of that cataclysmic blow up prevents people from taking the plunge.
I think that using some of the techniques outlined in the article certainly mitigate that risk.
YES. This is why working with my brother is awesome. We know exactly which work to pass off to each other. There's never any "I could have done that better" competition or awkwardness.
What I find interesting is that nepotism is somewhat taboo in western culture. With businesses either deciding not to hire family or being careful to avoid favouritism.
On the other hand, shops in my area that are run by those originally from the east (or descendants thereof) are almost entirely family run with the assumption usually being that the oldest son is effectively the "deputy" and will be the one to run the business when the father retires.
Toyota's current CEO is a descendant of the founder of the company. Dynastic family members are dispersed throughout the "group companies". I wonder how much of such behavior would be tolerated in the west. (then again, James Murdoch is pretty high in News Corp so who knows).
It's also interesting to see here in the West how people that act like it would be a huge ethics violation to hire a relative have no problem hiring a friend. Drama and favoritism problems, though, are similiar, whether your'e working with friends or family.
Working with a friend and family had a great advantage that even if you mess up something they will be still around to help (now, if your "friends" stop being your friend because of some business failure then they were not real friends anyway).
There are so many possible risk scenarios not discussed in that essay. It does take more maturity, healthy relationship skills and good communication to work with existing people in your life. But that's fine, we should develop those skills anyway.
It's perfectly possible that a CEO could be 'happy' while his/her friends quietly remain unhappy.
In a way, a company failing could be the best outcome for friends and family getting hired -- everyone tried together and bonded in the crash. The worst could be a quality exit, in which your friend is enriched at 10-100x the amount you are. It's hard to stay friends with someone who just worked you hard for n years and then made 100x the money off the experience.