A PASSAGEM DO BASTÃO PARA HERDEIRAS: O CASO DE UMA EMPRESA DO ABC PAULISTA EM FASE DE PREPARAÇÃO PARA A SUCESSÃO FAMILIAR

Este estudo tem como finalidade primeira contribuir com o debate especializado que enfrenta o desafio de apontar caminhos que auxiliem as empresas familiares a garantirem a própria continuidade a partir da segunda geração de dirigentes. Embora imprecisas e desatualizadas, as estatísticas mostram que 70% dos negócios familiares sucumbem ao alcançarem a segunda geração e, em média, apenas 15% conseguem sobreviver até a terceira geração. A sucessão constitui o tema de maior atenção dos especialistas. Entretanto, há indicações de que, embora as pesquisas se multipliquem a cada ano, existe uma relativa estagnação teórica do campo. Nos últimos anos observa-se um discreto aumento de participação de mulheres em cargos de presidência das empresas familiares que, historicamente,influenciadas pela cultura patriarcal,elegem seus filhos herdeiros como sucessores. Este estudo, portanto, foi orientado pelo objetivo geral de identificar elementos do processo sucessório que permitam o aprofundamento da aparente mudança que está ocorrendo nas empresas familiares, evidenciada pelo discreto aumento do repasse do comando às mulheres, o que, a princípio, contraria a tradição patriarcal. De modo específico, este estudo foi orientado pelos seguintes objetivos: i) analisar a práxis de determinada família empresária que, tendo inaugurado o processo sucessório em sua empresa, encontra-se em fase de preparação de uma filha para assumir o comando do negócio no lugar do pai/fundador; ii) à luz do conhecimento teórico acumulado e da práxis da família empresária investigada reunir um conhecimento que permita a formulação de hipóteses que contribuam com o aprofundamento da problemática tratada neste estudo. Trata-se de uma pesquisa de caráter exploratório que emprega os seguintes métodos: qualitativo, monográfico/estudo de caso e dialético. A unidade de análise é a família proprietária de uma empresa sediada na região do ABC Paulista há 30 anosque se encontra em fase de preparação de uma filha (herdeira) para assumir o comando no lugar do pai/fundador. Existem evidências de que a decisão sucessória foi tomada estrategicamente com afinalidade de garantir que o patrimônio familiar continue sendo controlado pelo fundador, conforme preconiza o modelo de patrimonialismo patriarcal que se faz presente na sociedade brasileira.

Promotion and succession management and associated retention issues in Australian law firms

The focus of this research was promotion and succession management in Australian law firms. Two staff retention issues currently faced by the Australian legal industry were identified as suggesting possible failures in this area: 1) Practitioners are leaving law firms early in their careers, 2) Female representation is disproportionally low at partnership level. The research described current Australian law firm promotion and succession practices and then explained their possible relevance to the two retention issues. The overall aim of the research was to uncover key findings and present practical recommendations to law firm managers and partners ready for incorporation into their future promotion and succession planning practice. In so doing the research aimed to benefit the Australian legal community as a whole. Four areas of literature relevant to the topic were reviewed, 1) law firm governance concluding that the fundamental values of the P²-Form remained constant (Cooper, Hinings, Greenwood & Brown, 1996; Morris & Pinnington, 1998) with ownership and strategic control of law firms remaining in the hands of partners; 2) the importance of individual practitioners to law firms concluding that the actual and opportunity costs relating to practitioner turnover were significant due to the transient nature of knowledge as a key asset of law firms (Gottschalk & Khandelwal, 2004; Rebitzer & Taylor, 2007); 3) generational differences concluding with support for the work of Finegold, Mohrman and Spreitzer (2002), Davis, Pawlowski and Houston (2006), Kuhnreuther (2003), and Avery, McKay, and Wilson (2007) which indicated that generational cohort differences were of little utility in human resources management practice; and 4) previous research relating to law firm promotion and succession practices indicating that five practices were relevant in law firm promotion outcomes; 1) firm billing requirements (Gorman & Kmec, 2009; Phillips, 2001; Noonan & Corcoran, 2004; Webley & Duff, 2007); 2) mentoring programs (Phillips, 2001; Noonan & Corcoran, 2004); 3) the existence of female partners (Gorman & Kmec, 2009; Beckman & Phillips, 2005); 4) non-partner career paths (Phillips, 2001; Corcoran & Noonan, 2004); and 5) the existence of family friendly policies (Gorman & Kmec, 2009; Phillips, 2001; Noonan & Corcoran, 2004; Webley & Duff, 2007.) The research was carried out via a sequential mixed method approach. The initial quantitative study was based upon a theoretical framework grounded in the literature and provided baseline information describing Australian law firm promotion and succession practices. The study was carried out via an on-line survey of Australian law firm practitioners. The results of the study provided the basis for the second qualitative study. The qualitative study further explained the statistically generated results and focused specifically on the two identified retention issues. The study was conducted via one-on-one interviews with Australian law firm partners and experienced law firm managers. The results of both studies were combined within the context of relevant literature resulting in eight key findings: Key findings 1) Organisational commitment levels across generational cohorts are more homogenous than different. 2) Law firm practitioners are leaving law firms early in their careers due to the heavy time commitment behaviour demanded of them, particularly by clients. 3) Law firm promotion and succession practices reinforce practitioner time commitment behaviour marking it as an indicator of practitioner success. 4) Law firm practitioners believe that they have many career options outside law firms and are considering these options. 5) Female practitioners are considering opting out of law firms due to time commitment demands related to partnership conflicting with family commitment demands. 6) A masculine, high time commitment culture in law firms is related to the decision by female practitioners to leave law firms. 7) The uptake of alternative work arrangements by female practitioners is not fatal to their partnership prospects particularly in firms with supportive policies, processes and organisational culture. 8) Female practitioners are less inclined than their male counterparts to seek partnership as an ultimate goal and are more likely to opt out of law firms exhibiting highly competitive, masculine cultures. Practical recommendations Further review of the data collected in relation to the key findings provided the basis for nine practical recommendations specifically geared towards implementation by law firm managers and partners. The first recommendation relates to the use of generational differences in practitioner management. The next six relate to recommended actions to reduce the time commitment demands on practitioners. The final two recommendations relate to the practical implementation of these actions both at an individual and organisational level. The recommendations are as follows: 1) "Generationally driven," age based generalisations should not be utilised in law firm promotion and succession management practice. 2) Expected levels of client access to practitioners be negotiated on a client by client basis and be included in client retention agreements. 3) Appropriate alternative working arrangements such as working off-site, flexible working hours or part-time work be offered to practitioners in situations where doing so will not compromise client serviceability. 4) The copying of long working hour behaviours of senior practitioners should be discouraged particularly where information technology can facilitate remote client serviceability. 5) Refocus the use of timesheets from an employer monitoring tool to an employee empowerment tool. 6) Policies and processes relating to the offer of alternative working arrangements be supported and reinforced by law firm organisational culture. 7) Requests for alternative working arrangements be determined without regard to gender. 8) Incentives and employment conditions offered to practitioners to be individualised based on the subjective need of the individual and negotiated as a part of the current employee performance review process. 9) Individually negotiated employment conditions be negotiated within the context of the firm’s overall strategic planning process. Through the conduct of the descripto-explanatory study, a detailed discussion of current law firm promotion and succession practices was enabled. From this discussion, 7 eight key findings and nine associated recommendations were generated as well as an insight into the future of the profession being given. The key findings and recommendations provide practical advice to law firm managers and partners in relation to their everyday promotion and succession practice. The need to negotiate individual employee workplace conditions and their integration into overall law firm business planning was put forward. By doing so, it was suggested that both the individual employee and the employing law firm would mutually benefit from the arrangement. The study therefore broadened its practical contribution from human resources management to a contribution to the overall management practice of Australian law firms. In so doing, the research has provided an encompassing contribution to the Australian legal industry both in terms of employee welfare as well as firm and industry level success.

Succession law keeping pace with changes in technology and community expectations – informal wills

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into recent developments in the way the law of succession allows people to use new technologies to document their testamentary intentions in an informal way. Design/methodology/approach – This article considers one area in which the law has arguably kept good pace with advances in society’s expectations and technological change – the law of succession. This article examines the legislative reforms in Queensland and other jurisdictions permitting the recognition of informal wills and the decided cases in the area. In particular, the article examines the decision in a Queensland Supreme Court case in which the court recognised the validity of a will made on an iPhone. Research limitations/implications – This is a doctrinal analysis, not an empirical study, and accordingly is limited to providing details specific to the legislation and the court cases selected.

Determinants of farmer retirement and farm succession in Finland

In the past decade, the Finnish agricultural sector has undergone rapid structural changes. The number of farms has decreased and the average farm size has increased when the number of farms transferred to new entrants has decreased. Part of the structural change in agriculture is manifested in early retirement programmes. In studying farmers exit behaviour in different countries, institutional differences, incentive programmes and constraints are found to matter. In Finland, farmers early retirement programmes were first introduced in 1974 and, during the last ten years, they have been carried out within the European Union framework for these programmes. The early retirement benefits are farmer specific and de-pend on the level of pension insurance the farmer has paid over his active farming years. In order to predict the future development of the agricultural sector, farmers have been frequently asked about their future plans and their plans for succession. However, the plans the farmers made for succession have been found to be time inconsistent. This study estimates the value of farmers stated succession plans in predicting revealed succession decisions. A stated succession plan exists when a farmer answers in a survey questionnaire that the farm is going to be transferred to a new entrant within a five-year period. The succession is revealed when the farm is transferred to a suc-cessor. Stated and revealed behaviour was estimated as a recursive Binomial Probit Model, which accounts for the censoring of the decision variables and controls for a potential correlation between the two equations. The results suggest that the succession plans, as stated by elderly farmers in the questionnaires, do not provide information that is significant and valuable in predicting true, com-pleted successions. Therefore, farmer exit should be analysed based on observed behaviour rather than on stated plans and intentions. As farm retirement plays a crucial role in determining the characteristics of structural change in agriculture, it is important to establish the factors which determine an exit from farming among eld-erly farmers and how off-farm income and income losses affect their exit choices. In this study, the observed choice of pension scheme by elderly farmers was analysed by a bivariate probit model. Despite some variations in significance and the effects of each factor, the ages of the farmer and spouse, the age and number of potential successors, farm size, income loss when retiring and the location of the farm together with the production line were found to be the most important determi-nants of early retirement and the transfer or closure of farms. Recently, the labour status of the spouse has been found to contribute significantly to individual retirement decisions. In this study, the effect of spousal retirement and economic incentives related to the timing of a farming couple s early retirement decision were analysed with a duration model. The results suggest that an expected pension in particular advances farm transfers. It was found that on farms operated by a couple, both early retirement and farm succession took place more often than on farms operated by a single person. However, the existence of a spouse delayed the timing of early retirement. Farming couples were found to co-ordinate their early retirement decisions when they both exit through agricultural retirement programmes, but such a co-ordination did not exist when one of the spouses retired under other pension schemes. Besides changes in the agricultural structure, the share and amount of off-farm income of a farm family s total income has also increased. In the study, the effect of off-farm income on farmers retirement decisions, in addition to other financial factors, was analysed. The unknown parameters were first estimated by a switching-type multivariate probit model and then by the simulated maxi-mum likelihood (SML) method, controlling for farmer specific fixed effects and serial correlation of the errors. The results suggest that elderly farmers off-farm income is a significant determinant in a farmer s choice to exit and close down the farm. However, off-farm income only has a short term effect on structural changes in agriculture since it does not significantly contribute to the timing of farm successions.

Paradoxical evidence integration in rapid decision processes

Decisions about noisy stimuli require evidence integration over time. Traditionally, evidence integration and decision making are described as a one-stage process: a decision is made when evidence for the presence of a stimulus crosses a threshold. Here, we show that one-stage models cannot explain psychophysical experiments on feature fusion, where two visual stimuli are presented in rapid succession. Paradoxically, the second stimulus biases decisions more strongly than the first one, contrary to predictions of one-stage models and intuition. We present a two-stage model where sensory information is integrated and buffered before it is fed into a drift diffusion process. The model is tested in a series of psychophysical experiments and explains both accuracy and reaction time distributions. © 2012 Rüter et al.

Meaning of "residing with" and succession rights

Reviews case law on the meaning of the phrase "residing with" as used in the Housing Act 1985 s.87 to identify one of the qualifying requirements for the right to succeed to a secure tenancy. Focuses on the Court of Appeal decision in Freeman v Islington LBC on whether a daughter intended to have her settled home with her father where, in the year preceding her father's death she lived with him full time in order to care for him whilst retaining her own flat and using it as her correspondence address for everything but her credit card. Lists conclusions that can be drawn from the case law.

Retirement and succession on the family farm

For farmers, the decision as to when to retire is probably one of the hardest that they will have to face during their working lives. The business of farming brings special circumstances which means that retirement is more often a process than a definitive action. This paper seeks firstly to clarify those special circumstances, and then, by means of flow charts, to identify the key decisions which must be faced if the retirement is to be successful. The practise of handing on the farmland and the other business assets to the next generation are regarded as separate but interrelated stages in the process of retirement, both having legal, financial and human consequences which are considered. By way of conclusion, the parameters for a successful retirement are considered, both from the standpoint of the retirer and of the successor.

The Role of Succession Planning in Leadership Development

In progressive companies succession planning plays a vital role in leadership development. Some companies have neither succession planning nor ways to fill leadership gaps. On the academic side of research, this Capstone Project focuses on the role of succession planning in leadership development through various approaches and theories. The purpose of this Capstone Project is to provide HR professionals with solid mechanisms for identifying and preparing leaders for leadership roles through proper succession mapping within a company. Through the analysis of case studies and research, recommendations are made on the formulation of a decision tree so that succession planning may take a new place in leadership development in an organization.

Tourism Destination Preferences: A Longitudinal Analysis of Consumer Decision Sets

There have only been a small number of applications of consumer decision set theory to holiday destination choice, and these studies have tended to rely on a single cross sectional snapshot of research participants’ stated preferences. Very little has been reported on the relationship between stated destination preferences and actual travel, or changes in decision set composition over time. The paper presents a rare longitudinal examination of destination decision sets, in the context of short break holidays by car in Queensland, Australia. Two questionnaires were administered, three months apart. The first identified destination preferences while the second examined actual travel and revisited destination preferences. In relation to the conference theme, there was very little change in consumer preferences towards the competitive set of destinations over the three month period. A key implication for the destination of interest, which, in an attempt to change market perceptions, launched a new brand campaign during the period of the project, is that a long term investment in a consistent brand message will be required to change market perceptions. The results go some way to support the proposition that the positioning of a destination into a consumer’s decision set represents a source of competitive advantage.