They are dead wrong! They say “run your family like a business”, when they should say “run your business like a family”

In the weekend review section of the Wall Street Journal, there is an article titled:

Run your family like a business

The article is an adapted version of the book "The Secrets of Happy Families: Improve Your Mornings, Rethink Family Dinner, Fight Smarter, Go Out and Play, and Much More."

It didn’t take me long to see how the article’s basic premise was flawed. 

A new generation of parents is now taking solutions from the workplace and transferring them home. From accountability checklists to family branding sessions, from time-shifting meals to more efficient conflict resolution, families are finally reaping the benefits of decades of groundbreaking research into group dynamics. The result is a bold new blueprint for happy families.

The basic premise here is that since families are not able to solve their own problems, they must turn to business for the secrets of success.

To suggest that business practices can be used to “run” a family, shows how little the author understands about what the family is.

You run a machine, you don’t “run” a family.

The very reason so many families are dysfunctional today is because they are being “run.”  If there is one thing that you cannot “run”, it is a family.

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While the word family represents many people, there is another word that signifies just one person, who is the quintessence of the family: mother.

A good mother is the epitome of love and affection, and consequently goodness and mercy.

Through contact with his mother, the child begins to understand untiring goodness, grace, support and inexhaustible love.  He experiences that maternal affection whereby a mother is never tired or bored of being with her child.

For a true mother, the joy of life consists in holding her child in her arms, putting him down to watch him run this way and that and being unceasingly riddled with her child’s questions.

As the child grows, he feels the joy that a good mother brings him.  The children also starts to suffer and to see how life can be very difficult.

However, to the extent that he remembers his mother, he remembers the Paradise of his childhood. With this remembrance, he is well equipped to face all the hardships of life and to hope for eternal happiness with the Blessed Mother in heaven for all of eternity.

One of the main reasons why so many families fail today is because the mother is out doing business instead of taking care of her children.

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If you want to ruin your family, try to run it like a business.  On the other hand, if you want to run a successful business, run it like a family. 

One study says: “The magic formula that successful businesses have discovered is to treat employees like family, where the line between personal and professional is often blurred.”

For ever, the family spirit has been the heart and soul of sound economy and business.  Take out family spirit, and you have a machine. 

And only soulless people enjoy being treated like a machine.

In his new book, Return to Order,  author John Horvat II explains:

“When the traditional family as an institution is restored, then we will see its spirit permeate all society.  No other influence extends itself farther throughout society.”

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Part of this article was taken and adapted from The Mother: Love, Affection, Goodness, and Mercy Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira.