Communication · Executive Insight Brief · 518
Dinner is not a board meeting
The Three-Circle Model separates kinship, ownership rights, and operating responsibility before family-enterprise disputes become personal conflicts
Premise
An argument between relatives over dividends may contain three different questions. One concerns family fairness, another return on invested equity, and a third the cash needed to run the company. Treating these as one interpersonal disagreement obscures the source of each claim.
Succession, capital allocation, and executive appointments require clarity about whose role is speaking and which body is authorized to decide. The Three-Circle Model of the Family Business System makes that authority problem visible before a conversation is mistaken for a decision. Without the separation, a family member may interpret an ordinary capital-allocation disagreement as a rejection of kinship loyalty.
What the model is: Three-Circle Model of the Family Business System in Knowledge →
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- FamilyModel
- CategoryAnalytical Frameworks, Typologies & Heuristics
- DomainOrganization & Structure
What these mean
Editorial orientation · Family
Model
In this series, Model names the editorial family primarily used to understand and explain communication: theories, frameworks, effects, traditions, principles and other conceptual resources. It is an umbrella for a route into the field, not a claim that every included object is a predictive model.
Editorial orientation · Category
Analytical Frameworks, Typologies & Heuristics
Organizes dimensions, distinctions, types or questions so that a situation can be examined systematically. A framework supplies structure, a typology distinguishes forms, and a heuristic offers a usable way to orient judgment.