It took both the offer of the president's title and a strong push from her husband to convince Dinah to take up her father's offer. But she saw the logic of it from the beginning. For Praendex to survive, someone had to take over while her father was still active and able to pass on the wisdom gained through experience. She knew about the problems her brothers were having, and she felt confident she could avoid most of them.
"We share a certain temperament," she explains. "I'm the most logical and least emotional of his chidren. I have a conciliatory manner. And my father is much less difficult to work for than some of the other men I've worked for."
Now, 15 months later, her father has nothing but praise for his new president. She has professionalized the company's marketing efforts, launching a successful direct-mail campaign targeted to CEOs of midsize corporations. She's improved the company's relationships with its 22 licensees. There's even a national public-relations push underway.
"Dinah's more daring than I am," Daniels marveled as he showed me around the company's new headquarters. It was Dinah's decision to double the office size, adding expensive new conference space in which Praendex now offers its refresher courses and a new series of seminars -- a loss leader that is now a profit center. "If one of the boys had suggested that, there wouldn't have been a prayer," he continued. "But when Dinah tells me I'm wrong or I don't know enough, I can consider it rationally. When the boys try to tell me the same thing, I react as if it were a personal attack."
Arnie Jr. applauds the changes, too. With Dinah acting as a buffer, he enjoys more autonomy and suffers less head-butting. "It's working incomparably better than it did. She has a talent for saying things to him like a mother to a child. If I had to say the same things, it would be combat. She can scold him and chide him."
Dinah agrees. "I think fathers admire bossiness in their daughters. It tickles them. But I also do things for my father my brothers couldn't stand to do. I Xerox for him, and I make sure he gets the lunch he needs. I'm not proud."
Call it stroking. Call it nurturing. Emotionally, sons just aren't wired to offer it. Daughters are. And for a father facing the prospect of giving up a big piece of his own identity, that's all the difference in the world.
"He feels sure that I admire what he's done, respect that he still does it, and acknowledge that I've never done it -- that's a big security blanket," Dinah explains. "Both my brothers think the business would be better if Dad were out. But I think he has a tremendous amount to teach me. I'm glad he's here."
What really clinches it for Daniels, however, is not only the way his daughter treats him, but the way she treats his business. "I care about this business in an emotional way," she says. "I think about it as a responsibility. It's important that my mom's life not change, and that the business continue to be available to take care of all the family. I don't think my brothers worry about it to the same degree."
Not the Daniels brothers. And not most brothers, according to many of the students of family business I spoke with. Among the most perceptive was Matilde Salganicoff, a Philadelphia family-business consultant and therapist who runs workshops for women in family businesses at The Wharton School.
"Women are taught to be more nurturing, more attuned to emotional needs, and are socialized to express more concern with helping the family," Salganicoff says. "Women generally go into the business to help the family, and secondarily to develop a career. But sons don't go in primarily to help their father or their family -- it's simply not their central theme."
There is nothing particularly new in all this. Fathers and sons have tangled since the days of Isaac and Oedipus, and the relationship has been explored by men no less wise than Shakespeare and Turgenev and Freud. And yet even in this age of psychological sophistication and sexual equality, the daughter option is just beginning to sink into the consciousness of family business owners who will pass on the reins in record numbers over the coming decade. You wouldn't call it a trend so much as a trickle.
"Fifty percent of the potential successors are daughters," reminds Donald Jonovic of Family Business Management Services, in Cleveland. "If only 5% of the actual successors were daughters, it would be a magnificent improvement."
Traditionally, the bias toward the son started very early. Although sons and daughters grew up hearing the same dinner-table conversation about the business, it was the son who heard it through the ears of the heir apparent. As a result, sons have tended to view the business as their birth-right and have not taken the time or trouble to go out and get other experience. The top job has been something they expected to inherit, not earn.
For daughters it has been very different -- and better for them that it has. When a daughter winds up taking over the family business, it is most often only after she has proven herself in other companies or other settings. The odds are that she has had to work harder, train harder, and push harder to get where she is going. And her performance on the outside is an early and fairly reliable indicator of how successful she'll be at the head of the family company.
Convincing Dad that she is worthy is only the first hurdle, however. Convincing employees, clients, and suppliers is something else. That's always been a challenge for children brought into the business, and only a sustained period of competence and accomplishment can ever quiet the whispered questions about favoritism and nepotism. But for daughters, there is an added layer of prejudice to overcome -- the same prejudice faced by ambitious women anywhere. Not all daughters survive those tests, but those who do come out stronger and more confident for it.
I found just such a daughter at an iron forge in Elyria, Ohio. Kasper Foundry Co. is an old-line, third-generation family business in a traditional industry, with a plant that Charles Dickens might have used as a setting: a dimly lit cavern of grime and molten metal, freezing in winter, sweltering in summer, where brawny men sweat and swear and spit tobacco. As she moves through the foundry dressed in jumpsuit, hard hat, and silver-studded cowboy boots, 26-year-old Betsy Kasper looks as if she has stepped out of the movie Flashdance.
