One of the elements of understanding a group, any group, concerns the membership of that group. How is membership determined? In our case, how do you become an employee of the company? How do you become an owner? Or what defines a family member?
The intent of the... was to first of all categorize members of the system in different parts of the three circles. You could be a family only member of the system.
You could be a family owner, you could be a family employee, you could be a non-family owner. Seven different sectors, people fit into one of those. One of the principles, in my view, of effective groups, highly effective groups, is that there is a strong commitment by the members to the group, and yet membership is voluntary.
This is easiest to understand, of course, in some cases. inside a business organization. You want the employees to be very committed to the company, but employment in the company is not a permanent association. You're not necessarily an employee for life.
You're an employee for as long as you're committed and you're adding value. In ownership, you're not necessarily an employee for life. we start to question whether somebody should be forced to be an owner of a family company or whether ownership itself, owning shares in a company should also be voluntary. And we can start to see the importance or the usefulness of voluntary membership in the ownership group. You can't be disruptively joining and leaving an ownership group, but under regulated conditions, we can understand that voluntary membership and the ability to get rid of some owners or to invite them in.
in new owners is a healthy condition in an ownership group. But what about the family? Does this voluntary principle apply also to families? It's natural to think of families as permanent groups.
Once you're born into a family, you're in the group for the rest of your life. We have become more accustomed, more comfortable understanding that marrying into a group does not imply permanent membership in the group. But being born into or even adopted into a family still implies permanence.
And yet we know that family groups over time can become disunited and fractured in a way so that a family... a single family identity no longer holds for the group and it's healthier in a number of ways to divide the family and hence the ownership group into different subgroups and allow them to continue with more a more united base and more independent decision making than trying to keep them together the same principle is true about any individual inside a family. Western society, especially, has over the centuries come to identify family groups as largely blood-related organizations. While blood is a an important factor defining who is in or who is out of a family.
It's only one of three factors that I think are key to thinking about who's inside the family. And I use blood, sweat, and tears. as my helpful benchmarking to understand, is somebody really a member of the family or not?
Because do they have our blood doesn't account for the in-laws, the spouses who join families. Even if we include the in-laws in that group, we have to think about, do people, are people aligned with us? Are they? working for the same things? That's the sweat.
And do they celebrate and mourn with us as well? That's the tears. And if we had a more comprehensive understanding of what builds an effective family group. we would be able to think more broadly than just blood and also understand that families are more permanent than other groups that we join or are in in our lives, but they still can be, in a very healthy way, considered voluntary associations.
So that when a member of the family no longer fits, he or she can leave. And I would think if somebody else can be brought into a group, maybe in a marriage relationship, but I think in other ways as well, they can be considered part of our family because they may not have our blood, but they do have our goals and our values and share our ups and downs.