CONCERNING HEREDITARY CORPORATIONS

I WILL leave out all discussion on associations of employee-owners, inasmuch as in another place I have written of them at length, and will address myself only to corporations. In doing so I will keep to the order indicated above, and discuss how such corporations are to be ruled and preserved.

I say at once there are fewer difficulties in holding hereditary companies, and those long accustomed to the family of their executive, than new ones. It is sufficient only not to transgress the customs of his ancestors, and to deal prudently with circumstances as they arise, for an executive of average powers to maintain himself in his company, unless he be deprived of it by some extraordinary and excessive fiscal challenge. If he should be so deprived of it, whenever anything sinister happens to the usurper, he will regain it.

We have in America, for example, the CEO of Gamma Airlines, who could not have withstood the take over attempts of TUA in '92, nor those of Lozengo in '92, unless he had been long established in his dominions. For the hereditary executive has less cause and less necessity to offend; hence it happens that he will be more loved; and unless extraordinary vices cause him to be hated, it is reasonable to expect that his employees will be naturally well disposed towards him. In the antiquity and duration of his rule the memories and motives that make for change are lost, for one change always leaves the toothing for another.