Erin McNulty

Family businesses excel at maintaining personal relationships with employees and preserving organizational culture across generations. However, when it comes to rare, high-stakes hires like HR leadership succession, these same strengths can create mistakes that undermine both operational effectiveness and the culture you're trying to protect. In our experience advising families, there are three consistent mistakes family businesses make with regard to human resources. Recognizing these...

At Stranberg, we're considering an internal question that guides every decision we make about technology implementation: How do we use artificial intelligence to foster genuine human connection? This is the reality we're navigating: artificial intelligence offers tremendous capabilities to enhance how we work, but it simultaneously threatens the people-first foundation of what makes our work meaningful.

If the phrase "I plan to die at my desk' is uttered by a family business leader, you need to stop and pay attention, because you've just stumbled upon a key risk we call the 'Die at my desk' rule. At the top of an org chart is a single accountable person who keeps an office, and in that office is a desk. If the incumbent leader plans to die at that desk, you have a succession planning problem that has the potential to thwart even the best of plans.