Trump with Kennedy and Lincoln has something to teach family businesses

Lately, thanks to a nonchalant use of social media, the public has had the opportunity to read confidential messages exchanged between public figures with relevant roles concerning important decisions. These range from the chat with which the military attack against the Houthis was decided to the obsequious message from Rutte, Nato secretary general, to Trump.

Family capitalism can learn some useful lessons from these messages: after all, in the context of a company, whoever is owner, entrepreneur and manager is a plenipotentiary, and even when there is no sole owner, there may be a partner with a large majority, and even when there are several managers, there is one who by role or surname has more weight than the others. The founding entrepreneur, then, by definition has a power given by authority that is often preponderant over any formal division of power. Finally, when there are several leading figures in a business organisation, it may happen that the members of a family tend to think alike out of common values or to please one another.

These contexts, in family businesses, can lead to so-called 'group conformity': a phenomenon that occurs when a group of well-intentioned people make irrational or sub-optimal decisions, driven by the desire to conform or the belief that dissent is impossible due to the disproportionate distribution of power among the stakeholders.

A historical and widely studied case of group conformism was the decision to invade Cuba that led to the Bay of Pigs: those participating in the project wanted to invade Cuba and any doubts or dissent went unheeded or worse stifled. The participants reinforced each other's convictions and did not elaborate on what could have gone wrong. familyandtrends has seen this happen in major investment decisions or company takeovers: the group wants to do a certain thing and is convinced that every obstacle is smaller than it will be and every doubt is deemed unjustified to the point of silencing those who try to point it out. In case, then, there is a pierin who just does not want to abdicate to the conformity of the group some 'powerful' in the room utters the phrase that marks every wrong investment and every failed acquisition: 'we must do it: it is strategic'.

Thanks to the intelligence of a Harvard professor who later became Ford's president and ended up as JF Kennedy's defence minister, Robert McNamara, an antidote to group conformity was found, which, used for the first time after the Bay of Pigs, led to the naval blockade to solve the Cuban missile crisis. McNamara formed the ExComm, Executive Committee of the National Security Council, with members having different skills and visions: diplomats, military, political advisers with the precise and only objective of avoiding a single dominant point of view. In order to curb adherence to a priori convictions, he imposed a huge amount of detailed analysis for various possible scenarios spiced with a large number of follow-up questions so that decisions would be based more on facts than on emotions, convictions or political pressure. To prevent the boss's opinion or behaviour from influencing the decision-making process, McNamara in many meetings kept JFK outside the door and when he did attend he made sure he did not take any aprioristic positions before a healthy and open discussion had analysed every possible scenario and implication. The title of Graham Allison's book that later theorised this process makes it clear what this approach entails: Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis.