Ken McCracken – författare

Family business governance is often thought of as a set of formal policies and structures that every family business should adopt. This is misleading. This book introduces the concept of Natural Governance to broaden the debate and explains how family businesses are actually governed effectively using a combination of informal and formal processes.Written by Ken McCracken, who has worked as an adviser to family business over many years and gained significant insight, the book provides a framework to describe and sustain Natural Governance, and challenges some popular views about how family businesses should, or do in practice, behave and progress. It describes the more informal governance practices and processes that first emerge spontaneously in a family business, which are sustained by the natural inclination of a family business to move forwards by doing more of what has worked well in the past while trying to avoid repeating previous mistakes.This book is an essential read for any member of a family business, as well as all professionals who provide services to family businesses. It will also interest researchers and teachers who want to explore this neglected area of family business governance.

Family business governance is often thought of as a set of formal policies and structures that every family business should adopt. This is misleading. This book introduces the concept of Natural Governance to broaden the debate and explains how family businesses are actually governed effectively using a combination of informal and formal processes.Written by Ken McCracken, who has worked as an adviser to family business over many years and gained significant insight, the book provides a framework to describe and sustain Natural Governance, and challenges some popular views about how family businesses should, or do in practice, behave and progress. It describes the more informal governance practices and processes that first emerge spontaneously in a family business, which are sustained by the natural inclination of a family business to move forwards by doing more of what has worked well in the past while trying to avoid repeating previous mistakes.This book is an essential read for any member of a family business, as well as all professionals who provide services to family businesses. It will also interest researchers and teachers who want to explore this neglected area of family business governance.

The idea that every family business needs a trusted adviser is a popular one. This adviser is often portrayed as an individual who has a close personal relationship with the family and who coordinates the advice that they receive from a range of specialists. However, this model of a single adviser is not always the most effective when trying to build sustainable trust relationships alongside the generational changes that inevitably occur in family businesses.In an era where every adviser is a specialist, it is necessary to explore an alternative to the individual trusted adviser. This special report describes how family businesses can benefit from a high-performing, inter-disciplinary advisory team for trusted advice, with members sourced from different organisations, and who have demonstrably effective processes for looking after an entire family and their business interests. Members of such a team are committed to helping the family achieve success in terms of both family and business life and, like a true team, this success is dependent on all team members.High performance advisory teams are used in many areas of commerce, sport, science and the arts and this report demonstrates how the same can be true for advisers who serve family businesses, regardless of their specialism.

Cosmogenic radionuclides are radioactive isotopes which are produced by natural processes and distributed within the Earth system. With a holistic view of the environment the authors show in this book how cosmogenic radionuclides can be used to trace and to reconstruct the history of a large variety of processes. They discuss the way in which cosmogenic radionuclides can assist in the quantification of complex processes in the present-day environment. The book aims to demonstrate to the reader the strength of analytic tools based on cosmogenic radionuclides, their contribution to almost any field of modern science, and how these tools may assist in the solution of many present and future problems that we face here on Earth.The book provides a comprehensive discussion of the basic principles behind the applications of cosmogenic (and other) radionuclides as environmental tracers and dating tools. The second section of the book discusses in some detail the production of radionuclides by cosmic radiation, their transport and distribution in the atmosphere and the hydrosphere, their storage in natural archives, and how they are measured. The third section of the book presents a number of examples selected to illustrate typical tracer and dating applications in a number of different spheres (atmosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere, biosphere, solar physics and astronomy). At the same time the authors have outlined the limitations of the use of cosmogenic radionuclides.Written on a level understandable by graduate students without specialist skills in physics or mathematics, the book addresses a wide audience, ranging from archaeology, biophysics, and geophysics, to atmospheric physics, hydrology, astrophysics and space science.