In the US the family-owned enterprise seems to be the poor relation of the business world. Entrepreneurs such as Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, and Mark Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook, are household names. Becoming an entrepreneur is the fashionable route that many want to travel.
As a result, business schools are geared up to teach students how to launch their own companies. The ethos is that entrepreneurs, not families, create jobs.
“I would say culturally, in the US, we put the entrepreneur on a pedestal,” explains Andrew Keyt, executive director of the Family Business Center at the Quinlan School of Business at Loyola Unversity Chicago. He is also president of the North American branch of the Family Business Network.