Why «Como Liderar Empresas Familiares», by Miguel Pina e Cunha, Arménio Rego, Alexandre Dias da Cunha and Filipe S. Fernandes, is worth reading

«Como Liderar Empresas Familiares» (literally, “How to lead family businesses”) was written by three university professors — Miguel Pina e Cunha (Nova SBE), Arménio Rego (Católica Porto Business School) and Alexandre Dias da Cunha — together with the business journalist Filipe S. Fernandes, and published by Lua de Papel in 2017, with a foreword by Alexandre Soares dos Santos.

The book starts from questions that anyone who works in a family business will recognise: how do you dismiss a son or daughter who is not up to the job? How do you move the founder who built the business out of management once they are no longer the right person to run it?

What the book offers

• Two sides of the same company. The authors look at family businesses from their “sunny side” — the unique advantages of a business that grows around a group sharing the same goals and passions — and from their “lunar side” — the specific weaknesses that can drag the family into failure. The useful reading is to see both at once: the same closeness that brings loyalty and a long-term view is what makes it hard to say no to a relative.
• Nepotism and meritocracy. The book’s central question is how to combine the two, rather than pretending one of them does not exist. In a family business, the family will always have a seat at the table; the question is on what terms and under which rules.
• Inheritances, successions, promotions and rivalries. These are the four points where, according to the authors, the conflicts that become irreconcilable are born — and which, in larger companies, end up in the headlines once the veneer cracks.
• Leadership before structure. The focus is neither legal nor financial: it is leadership and the contradictions it faces, including balancing feelings against business rationality. The book combines figures and research with stories from Portuguese and foreign companies, and points out that groups such as Corticeira Amorim, Jerónimo Martins, Sonae and Viagens Abreu began as family businesses.

Why this matters to News readers

A large share of Portuguese SMEs is run by a family, and it is at these moments — the next generation coming in, the founder stepping out, the division of an estate — that many of them are made or broken. For a promoter, the book helps prepare those transitions before they become urgent. For an investor, it offers a framework for reading a family business during due diligence: who actually decides, how managers are chosen, and what happens when the founder leaves. These questions weigh as much on the value of a stake as the accounts do.

A caveat

The book deals with leadership, not with the legal side. In a real succession, the rules on transferring company shares on death set out in the articles of association (article 225 of the Código das Sociedades Comerciais (Portuguese Companies Code)), shareholder agreements and the division of the estate all have consequences of their own, which no amount of goodwill between relatives can replace. The book is useful for preparing the family conversation; the legal design of that transition should be done with a lawyer.