Balancing the Emotional Ledger: Axioms for Advising Families in Business

Introduction

This book was written by Joe Paul for family business advisors and consultants. It is a collection of ideas about working with families in business that developed over 35 years of working with families—first as a family therapist, and later as a consultant to families in business. His intent was to introduce concepts that would enhance practitioners’ work with families in business.

Joe described this work as part of his exit strategy, partially motivated by Parkinson’s disease which he knew would cause what he had learned to evaporate, unless he passed on the ideas. Earlier in his career he was not sure how much knowledge and insights he should share with colleagues. But as he advanced in his career and age, he found fulfillment in sharing his knowledge with others.

Every session with a client is a dynamic ecology of ideas. Their ideas and yours compete for mind space. Just so, as you read these lines you may experience new ideas creeping into your mind. Joe’s goal was to introduce concepts that will enrich the existing matrix of ideas that define your practice. The ideas you bring to the client’s cognitive ecology vary in their impact and their attractiveness to the client. Some ideas are simply more persuasive and influential. Axioms are the ideas that are most powerful. They are thought of as self-evident. When the client feels the impact and persuasiveness of the axiom, they begin to question their existing matrix of ideas and look for ways to implant the new axiom into their organization and family. Axioms are an organization’s most valuable intellectual asset.

These axioms are a collection of ideas that served Joe well in his professional journey. They are all concepts that worked well for him in maneuvering the situations of clients. Some are ideas that he stumbled upon in face-to-face meetings with clients, while others clarified themselves as he reflected about his work. Joe mentions that none of them were original to him but are the results of stimulations from clients and colleagues. He has indicated the source when it was known to him.

The concept used as the title, Balancing the Emotional Ledger, was originally coined by Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy, who developed the school of family systems theory called contextual theory. The concepts of contextual theory are, Joe believed, most relevant to the various family systems theories of counseling families in business.

The axioms are grouped into four categories: Family Patterns, Change, Trust and Practice Issues. While this provides us with a way to categorize the ideas, many of the ideas do not respect the boundaries of the categories.