In early 1975, my fourth year of managing the outdoor division, my mother sent me an article in the Wall Street Journal entitled, you hAve proBLeMs? Consider the pLight oF the nAtion’s soBs.10 The outdoor division was looking much better, the inventory had improved, and we had made some productive acquisitions. We had a stable workforce, competent management in the field, a good working relationship with all of the employees and a growing national business, accounting for 80 percent or more of our billing. But my father was still picking at every detail, finding fault without recognizing accomplishments, ignoring what the plant was like in the past while criticizing the present, and offering no hope for a better future.
The article, by staff reporter Everett Groseclose, was dated March 20, 1975, and helped me realize what was going on was really not unusual. A lot of SOBs (Sons of Bosses) were, like me, between a rock and a hard place.
The subhead flagged how wretched their lives could be, and provided insight on this “hypersensitive, emotion-filled world of conflicting wills, bruised egos and rivalries.”
Groseclose pointed out that “most men that run their own firms are intensely competitive entrepreneurs as opposed to professional managers who can run any number of companies without becoming emotionally involved.” I’m not making the call that any particular finding applied to me, but Harry Levinson, a psychologist who has studied father-son relationships in family-held firms, said, “For the entrepreneur, the business comes to define his position in life, thus when a son comes into the firm an entrepreneur may view his offspring as a threat, a potential embarrassment or merely someone to be tolerated to keep peace in the family. Only rarely is a son welcomed and given free-rein.”
The Wall Street Journal article pointed out that in 1969 an organization known as Sons of Bosses International was founded with chapters in twelve states. The group was made up of young men who had either taken control of the family business or were in line to get the job. I knew I was not in line to take over the family business, having been hired to run one of its divisions, so I didn’t seek out membership in this group. The core of the organization is the father-son relationship. As Groseclose said, “There is still a lot of mourning because, to hear SOBs tell it, the life of an SOB is anything but easy.”
Groseclose went on to say, “Most SOBs agree that once they have decided to go into the family business, the most difficult problem revolves around how much authority, if any, the father is willing to yield. In many cases where the answer is none, a parting of the ways is sometimes inevitable. SOBs note, however, that it is usually the son who departs.”
As Groseclose noted, the founder of SOBs, Gerald D. Slavin, said, “The key thing all SOBs have in common is that we’re all trying to solve the problem that we have working with and for our fathers. Believe me, that’s not easy.”
Therefore, “for many SOBs it is a question of biding their time, behaving themselves while the father continues to run the show,” Groseclose said. And with the outdoor operation, alone, that’s exactly where I was.
It was a combination of my father’s feeling that since all the major problems in the outdoor division had been solved, and because the plant looked respectable and had a solid base of national and local clients, it might be time to improve the bottom line. That, plus what I believe was a desire to expand an audience for his ego, led to a change in his career plans for me. He felt it was time to step up the promotion of his media companies as well as “step up” the outdoor bottom line by turning the outdoor companies over to professional outdoor managers.