Family and Business Values Cards

The Family and Business Values Cards

54 family and business values cards and instructions to help your family reach a consensus on the values that drive your behavior—past and future.
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Values are the principles that drive behavior and decisions, whether virtuous or dishonorable. They clarify what’s important in our lives and to our families. They are stable because they transmit across generations. They exert strong influence on both individual and family behavior—much more so than business policies. The most successful business families manage to leverage their shared values to maintain a defendable competitive advantage over other companies. When this is repeated over generations, family ownership becomes a powerful asset for business success.

Card sorting is a technique for exploring how individuals and teams rank or group relationships among items. It’s particularly useful as a tool for identifying family values, along with their relative importance and associated behaviors.
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A tool from the latest fieldbook: A Family Business on the Moon: 24 activities to plan your family and business future by Randel S. Carlock and Keng-Fun Loh, this activity is designed based on more than 30 years of teaching and advising family businesses around the world by Professor Randel S. Carlock of INSEAD, one of the world's leading and largest graduate business schools.

At the next family meeting, give each family member their own set of the Family and Business Values Cards to:

1. Individually, sort the full set of values cards in to around 5 more important values. Arrange the 5 values cards and rank them in order of importance from 1 to 5.  Write each value and its ranking onto 5 Post-it notes and post them on the wall or flip chart.
2. As a group, review the values and share what each value means to you. This is a great opportunity to begin working as a team to develop consensus on what the agreed shared family values should be. You can continue to discuss and rank the agreed top 5 values in order of importance, and create a second list of "Maybe? Let's talk more". Combine similar values such as 'integrity' and 'honesty' or 'professionalism' and 'merit' under related themes. Get family members to talk about the values that they chose that other family members didn't.
3. Describe the behaviors for the family and employees to demonstrate what each value means. This is a very important part of the process, as Values such as 'respect' or 'integrity' will mean very different things to family members from different generations, roles and life experience.

Learn more by reading Activity 8. The Force Within: Identifying your shared family values in A Family Business on the Moon. There are also additional instructions in the box. 

Contents
54 Values cards 
3 Blank cards
2 Instruction cards

Dimension
Card  55mm x 90mm
Box   55mm x 90mm x 15mm (closed)
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www.familyandbusinesslearning.com © 2018 Randel S. Carlock

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