Family Values - The Bedrock of Corporate Values

Last Saturday, I had the opportunity to listen to a talk by Mr. Howard Khoo, CEO and Executive Director of the Hing Yiap Group of Companies, a public listed company in the business of lifestyle fashion and F&B. The title of his talk was " Shuffling Family, Work & Play".

Among the many points shared by him on how he balances family, work and play, one particular message stood out very prominently. He owed his successes to the family values which have shaped the lives of his family members over the generations. He shared with the participants of how the values of sharing, caring, diligence, respect, tolerance, patience and risk taking were inculcated among the young and younger ones by his grandmother, parents, uncles and aunts through their respective beliefs, words, deeds and actions. Likewise, his children are now being exposed to and instilled with the same set of family values by his own unique way of incorporating these values while on business cum holiday trips and participating in sports activities.

We have witnessed and still witnessing how decades old corporate giants had fallen like bowling pins and consigned to the corporate scrapbooks. Many experts have put forwarded several plausible reasons for these modern day corporate failures. The absence of integrity and the presence of unsatiated monetary greed and unethical business practices have been singled out to be the principal causes.

If the researchers were to go back into the genesis of each of these fallen giants, they would have uncover the corporate principles, values and business practices of these organizations laid down by their respective founding fathers based on their own family values. It is not wrong to say that family values form the bedrock of corporate values. However, when these organizations grew by leaps and bounds over the years, professional managers were hired to lead and run the businesses with the founding family members taking a back seat.

As these professional managers were rewarded based on the level of corporate performance, they would have thrown caution to the wind and took extreme risks in the pursuit of corporate and also personal successes. Along the way, someone somehow lost his/her moral compass and whatever espoused corporate values stay at lip-service level with no inkling of the original intention of those values.

To me, this undesirable situation can be avoided if the affected corporations had put in place a set of values-based core competencies to be demonstrated by all levels of employee at all times.