Inception’s deepest layer: Insight to the family business
Topping the box office, Inception is full of intense action scenes, new age special effects and intriguing concepts. Yet, all the Hollywood-hype set aside, at the very heart of the blockbuster, the movie portrays many facts, fictions and biases about family businesses.
Critics have widely celebrated this new heist film about dream-stealing, praising its multi-layer story. Mr Cobb, played by one of Hollywood’s favorites Leonardo DiCaprio, leads a team specialized in infiltrating people’s dreams in order to steal their ideas. He is hired by Saito (Ken Watanabe), the CEO of a large Japanese energy corporation, to go beyond what he normally does: stealing information deeply hidden in people’s minds. Saito, fearing a powerful family-run competitor, challenges Cobb to “incept” or plant an idea into the mind of his business opponent through lucid dreaming.
The finely interwoven layers of this complex plot are wrapped around an intriguing theme on family business.
Both script writers, Christopher Nolan and DiCaprio, have cleverly used reality about family firms to construct this engaging story – in particular, the film unveils the little known strength of, as well as the continuity threat to, family businesses.
The power of family business
Family businesses are strong, powerful players in today’s marketplace. Often associated with small, local mom-and-pop shops, family firms are known to be hidden champions. Spending their energy on building powerful positions in their industries, they don’t typically ask for attention by listing themselves on stock exchanges. And, even when they do become ‘corporate,’ a large stake often remains within the family. Some of today’s well known businesses – Ford Motor Company, Wal-Mart, L’Oréal, BMW, Samsung, and many more – remain rooted in the family lines that created them.
Generally speaking, family businesses are conservatively financed and “under leveraged” according to investment bankers. Additionally, they are known to be quick decision makers, thanks to the natural alignment between shareholders and management. A number of large-scale empirical studies show that family firms outperform non-family firms, some reporting an outperformance of up to a solid 158% over 10 years.
Inception shows that Saito is very well aware of the competitive threat coming from a family firm called Fischer Morrow. Rather than making a generous offer to buy Fischer Morrow from the founding father/CEO, Maurice, and his son/heir Robert (Cillian Murphy), Saito summons Cobb and his team to subconsciously influence Robert, to “split up his father’s empire.”
Saito understands that this family business competitor is not a small player. He realizes the unlikelihood of making an offer to buy Fischer Morrow and resorts to using non-market means to dismantle his rivals. Cobb’s team devises a plan to incept the idea into Robert’s mind that his father doesn’t want him to follow his foot steps. From this base of dismantling a family business, Cobb takes Robert into various levels of dreams in order to carry out Saito’s mission.
Conveniently enough, this is Hollywood after all, Saito is able to cunningly take advantage of the reality of business succession.
[Next: The need for succession planning]
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