While family businesses have conceivably been around ever since human beings started living in communities and began benefiting from gains of specialization and trading, the attention on family business governance as a formal topic is only about 25 years old. Prior to the formal recognition of family businesses as a distinct organizational form, governance has been thought of as an issue that is of importance primarily for non-family businesses, especially those where there is a separation of ownership from the management – for example, widely-held companies such as IBM, or Google. Blindly copying corporate governance prescriptions from non-family businesses, however, can actually do a lot of harm to family businesses. There are specific ways in which governance in family businesses is, and needs to be, different from governance of non-family businesses, for it to have a positive effect in family businesses. In this article, I define the key objective of family business governance. I then offer a few prescriptions to improve governance in family businesses. Continue lendo