"If the name of the game is perpetuation, then the issue of succession is perhaps the fundamental executive task.But manpower planning cannot go on independently of strategic planning; the company needs a comprehensive overview of its current position, its desired position, and the best course of action for attaining its goals.Strategic planning is impossible without people, and organizational development is impossible without strategic planning.They go hand in glove."

Harry Levinson, Executive (1993)                  

Putting Passion into Enterprise

The perpetuation of a family business through multiple generations clearly demands exceptional leadership, with a compelling vision and a plan for achieving that vision.But it needs something more than that, something that isn't really taught in any of the business schools and may, in fact, be unteachable.

That additional something is the emotional commitment that the founder and the founder's progeny have made to the business and have demonstrated over multiple generations.It often subordinates the interest of family members to the interest of business survival. It extends to every facet of the enterprise, including improvements in manufacturing process, product development and promotion, market research, even the planning that goes into leadership succession, among many other activities important for the survival of a family enterprise.

To sustain a family business through not one or two, but three, four and even five generations is hard enough.To achieve such longevity requires remarkable competence.But to understand the survival of a family business over a span of almost four hundredyears, on the other hand, the founders and heirs had to have something else going for them besides just well-honed business skills.To survive that long, the heirs must have had an extraordinary passion for survival, an almost mystical sense of obligation that transcends the customary attitude of owners towards their businesses.

In today's business world, where the rationalizing methods of science and technology, along with a disciplined professionalism, have found their way into just about every nook and cranny of business life, one might think that there would be little room for passion. Dedication to good business practice? Of course!An intense commitment to make the business a better place to work, or to make it more profitable?Yes, most certainly!Ensuing leaders carrying forth a shared sense of purpose?For sure!But passion? The term itself connotes irrationality, the very opposite of methodical, scientifically-grounded business application.

To the contrary, I believe that passion is an essential ingredient in business life and, indeed, is an attribute that can give family-owned businesses a unique strategic edge.

What follows is an exceptional case study. We will examine a company, the Avedis Zildjian Company, a company that has been in business for 373 years, some thirteen generations, manufacturing and distributing virtually a single product--the cymbal!(In recent years they've added drumsticks).

In the sections to follow, I will demonstrate how the Zildjian family's passion for survival led to extraordinary strategic breakthroughs, not just in process innovation which launched the company, but in product development, market research, product promotion and effective succession planning, especially in the last decades of this century, in an ability to move away finally from the traditional principle of male succession--that ascriptive principle based on gender and birth order--to a meritocratic principle resting on demonstrated business competence.

Avedis Zildjian Company: America's Oldest Company of Record

This is the story of the Avedis ZildjianCompany, a business that has been cited by Dun and Bradstreet as the oldest company of record in the United States. Founded in 1623 in Constantinople, it was re-established in America in the late 1920's when Avedis Zildjian III was busy launching a candy business in Quincy, Massachusetts after immigrating to the United States in 1908. Unexpectedly, he received a letter from his uncle in Istanbul:

My Dear Nephew,

It is with a mixture of happiness, sorrow and deep concern that I write you this letter.

I regret that the time has come when failing health will soon make it impossible for me to continue to make the cymbals for which our family has been famous for over300 years.

For you, the son of my late brother, Haroutian, I am happy.Except for me, you are the oldest living male member of the Zildjian family.As such, you are the next in line to become heir to the family's secret formula and process of making the cymbals that have been the pride of the Zildjians over the centuries.

It now becomes your responsibility to take over the secret that is your heritage.

Sincerely,     

Aram Zildjian (1927)             

As the eldest male in the lineage, Avedis was the recipient of this impassioned plea and the natural choice as the succession candidate.Avedis agreed to his uncle's charge but urged that the business be moved to the United States.Soon thereafter, his uncle Aram arrived in Quincy, where his nephew Avedis and his American-born wife, Sally, lived, to supervise the organization of the new factory and to train Avedis, the thirdAvedis Zildjian, in the alloy process that had been a family secret since the early 17th century.

Imbued with the entrepreneurial spirit of the first Avedis, the Constantinople craftsman who discovered the formula, Avedis III managed to continue operating the candy business while launching the modern era of his family's heritage.Nor did Sally, his wife, have to be persuaded to go along with the risk of a new enterprise. As her son, Armand Zildjian, the company's current President, relates, she was intrigued by the romantic side of the business, the blend of family, history and music.Not only did she favor the idea but she went to her relatives to help secure the financing!

Today, the Avedis Zildjian Company is the global leader in the manufacture and marketing of cymbals.With approximately 65% of the world market share in cymbals, the company dominates its market and not just in sales volume alone. It is also the quality leader. 80% of professional percussion musicians use Zildjian cymbals.Beatle Ringo Starr is still using his original Zildjian "high hat" cymbals (on which Paul McCartney wrote a personal message) from the Sixties.

Without a doubt, one important reason for Avedis Zildjian Company's success in global markets, beside a reputation for quality, can be traced to the growing global appeal of American popular music during the post-World War II era--music for which the cymbal was an essential part of the percussion repertoire.But Zildjian cymbals not only rode, but led the crest of that 20th century wave in changing musical taste mainly because of the family's passion for the product, its quality and aggressive promotion.

In the manner of Coca-cola, Mercedes-Benz, Caterpillar and other famous trademarks, the Zildjian cymbal also typifies the concept of world classproduct and service standards, which gained popularity during the 1980's.Although the Avedis ZildjianCompanyis not, obviously, as widely known among the general public, it was an early pioneer of the world classproduct, long before that nomenclature came into vogue.Indeed, the company was the premium fabricator of the cymbal with market share in a number of countries outside of Turkey by the middle of the 19th century, long before Coke, Caterpillar or Mercedes-Benz cars had come on the scene.

A Passion for Product Quality

What makes the Zildjian case especially interesting is the fact that the cymbal has been the company's soleproduct for almost all of its entire existence. Most single product companies run exceptional risks because they lack the product diversification that can help them weather downturns in the business cycle along with changing consumer tastes.I suggest that the family's passion for product quality and market leadershiphelps to explain how the Avedis Zildjian Companywas able to offset the risk of being a single product enterprise over 13 generations!This is certainly true in the case of the United States Zildjians, for whom we have considerably more historical documentation.

Working hard to ensure that its cymbals would be preferred to any other on the market, Avedis Zildjian Company currently markets 500 different kinds of cymbals almost all of which were developed during the U. S. era, in the last 70 years of the family's four centuries of existence.What was Avedis III's key strategic insight?Clearly, he was able to diversify the company's single product line, which at the turn of the century was limited to just a handful of cymbals, by seeking out and, indeed, helping to createnew market niches for the cymbal in the world of percussion music.

By diversifying the product line in this way, the company was able to maintain its intense focus on producing a qualityproduct--a product it knew more about than any other competitor because it was willing to take the risk of remaining so specialized. Yet, at the same time, the company found ways to broaden the market for the cymbal so that percussion performers representing a much more diverse group of western musical genres came to adopt the cymbal as an essential part of their artistic "tool kit."That internal product line differentiation became insurance against the decline of this or that specific musical genre, whether jazz, swing, rock or band music.

But let's first go back and quickly survey the beginnings.When the first Avedis, the Constantinople alchemist-ancestor, discovered the new alloy formula in 1623, he had learned a way to enhance a product feature simply as a result of a new manufacturing process.The "process" with years of subsequent innovations, which today still requires 22 days to complete for each cymbal, created a brilliant projection of the cymbal's sound.

At the time Avedis I was putting his newly discovered formula to work in his forge in the capital of the Ottoman empire, Quincy, Massachusetts--indeed New England--was just being inhabited by early European settlers.As Avedis' fame spread, his patrons and fellow guildsmen gave him the additional name of "Zildjian"--a mixed Turkish-Armenian word for 'cymbalsmith.'

Because Avedis I wanted to preserve his competitive advantage and keep a lock on proprietary technology, subsequent family patriarchs were taught the method individually and had to memorize the secret formula. Three hundred years later, the leader of the first U.S. generation, Avedis Zildjian III, would craft a strategy that focused heavily on the American domestic market from the 1930's through the 1950's, and then turn the company's attention to the global marketplace during and after the 1960s.

The American Avedis also succeeded in merging the old world craft tradition of "hot liquid" fabrication based on the original 17th Century formula with the latest in 20th Century science, in the manufacturing process and quality control technology.True, alchemists aren't employed at the Zildjians' new plant headquartered in Norwell, Massachusetts, but metallurgists and technicians certainly are and they work with the original process invention of 1623, of "hot working" the product from a molten liquid, instead of cutting and hammering cymbals from pre-cast sheets of metal.Today, trusted employees are also taught the formula, under confidentiality agreements comparable to those enforced in other high-technology companies having proprietary process technology.

Learning the formula, and the 22-day fabrication process that it required, represented the rite of passage of male leadership in the family.It was a transfer of ownership and control from the outgoing patriarch to the incoming family head.It marked the anointing of the next generation leader.

The family's passion for product quality even paid off in the currency of business survival during World War II.Avedis Zildjian Companycould easily have been forced out of business because of priority military demands on the nation's limited tin and copper supplies. Instead, thanks to military band leaders insisting that their cymbals be of "Zildjian quality or better" on government requisition forms, the family had enough government work to enable a skeleton crew to continue at the plant!

The Zildjians' passionate commitment to quality, consistent with its historical roots, is equally powerful today where every cymbal is hand tested by a 30 year company veteran who is an integral member of the research and development team.Respect for the product is so intense that the warehouse is known as the "vault" and the carrying case is called a "safe."

Recently, Avedis Zildjian Company became the first manufacturer of percussion instruments to receive ISO 9000 certification for its process technology, an important assurance of commitment to quality that buyers will increasingly insist upon, so that each cymbal will be able to blend with the other cymbals in a drummer's percussion "workstation" yet retain its own distinctive voice. For the current generation, this perpetuates the company's institutionalization of world class fabrication standards.

A Synergistic Passion Between Music and Manufacturer

Although the Zildjian story has been told before, it has been told from a mainly musical historical perspective. That is hardly surprising in view of the historical interactions between the growth of the company and the new musical uses that evolved for the cymbal, first in western Europe and then in America in the 20th century.In the early 17th century, at the time Avedis I discovered the new alloy fabrication process, the cymbal was still predominantly an instrument linked to the musical culture of middle-eastern antiquity, of value primarily in religious and military ceremonies.

Although the cymbal began to have some vogue in western Europe as early as the late 17th century, when German composer Nicholaus Strungk first introduced it to a Hamburg audience in his 1680 opera Esther, its growing popularity during the 18th and 19th centuries probably owes more to changes in European military musical taste.A favorite instrument of the Turkish military for centuries, the cymbal came to be adopted by Prussian military bands in the late 18th century because the cymbal's brilliant crashing sound helped to create a stirring martial effect.

But, as noted earlier, by the latter half of the Zildjian company's American century, the cymbal had become one of the most important percussion instruments for just about every musical genre in western society, including jazz, swing, be-bop, Dixieland, rock and roll, and now the many proliferating new sub-species of rock, along with the traditional marching band musical scores.

I spoke earlier about a passion for product quality, which may very well have been the single most important business survival trait nourished by the family through close to four centuries.As a story about passion in business, the relationship between the family's product, the cymbal, and the world of music has an added poignancy because music is very much a passionate undertaking. Yet artistic passion is typically assumed to be the property of the performer or of the individual who composed the music!Whether we have in mind a Mozart, a Beethoven, a Bartok, a Brubeck, the Beatles, or any of a number of distinguished musician-composers, a fervent, even zealous, commitment to their chosen musical genre is taken for granted.

No passion, no creativity!Yet, nobody thinks of the craftsmen who produce the drums, pianos, flutes, horns and other instruments as suffused with a passion for their work in quite the same way.Historically, however, many of these artisans were also truly artists in their own right, and passionately committed to their craft!One thinks, for example, of Stradivarius, the gifted violin maker, and the many efforts, as yet unsuccessful, by contemporary violin makers to "reverse engineer" that great artisan's unique "process technology"which brought together wood, varnish and resins in a mystery of craftsmanship known only to Stradivarius and his associates, creating a sublime musical instrument that wasn't just world class for its day but truly timeless!

A Passion for Product Promotion and Development

As the unique quality of the Zildjian cymbal, its brilliant projection of sound, became well known in America's professional music community during and after the 1930's, distinguished musicians would make their appearance at the family's plant in Quincy and would be warmly received.Jazz great Gene Krupa and other drummers often came by the plant to pick out their cymbals and provide the Zildjian family with ideas on product innovations, a large number of which began to emerge in response to the prolific and fast-changing musical styles incubated by America's richly diverse ethnic and artistic sub-cultural worlds.

The family was able to improve its product offering by watching the drummers play the cymbals at the plant, which helped them better hone the product to get the desired tone, so that their cymbals could more adequately express the tastes of the visiting musicians.But, like the proverbial builder of the better mousetrap, Avedis III didn't just wait for the performing percussion musicians to beat a path to him!

Avedis frequently traveled to American jazz and other musical centers in the 1930s.This became his son Armand's passion in the 1940s as he travelled to New York, Chicago and Kansas City to find out how the cymbal was being used by performing artists.He not only observed how the artists used the instrument at their gigs in big city dives and nightclubs; he would also talk with the drummers about their passion for music, sometimes into the early morning hours.

By going to the settings where the instruments were being used, Armand could see how the drummers had modified the cymbal, for example, by drilling holes or attaching a key chain to the cymbal, thereby creating new sound effects.These observations provided critical information for new product development back at the plant.

Interestingly, Armand's style of aggressive market intelligence gathering, whereby the CEO or other senior executives seek out the end-user in his or her natural setting of use or at the point of purchase, was precisely the marketing strategy that a number of Japanese companies would later come to adopt in the U.S. in the 1980's, some three decades after the Zildjian family had realized the advantages of this "brass roots" approach to product promotion and market research.

It is an approach that brings the producer as close as possible to the end user.As Johansson and Nonaka pointed out in a May-June, 1987 Harvard Business Review article ("Market Research the Japanese Way"), senior Japanese executives at Canon, Sony, Matsushita and other major Tokyo-based companies routinely took the time to visit U.S. retail stores, talking directly to customers and front-line sales people.In the process, they learned at first hand, rather than third or fourth removed, how their and their competitors' products were being used--why this company's camera, or that manufacturer's car or electronic appliance was preferred at the point of sale by a live customer who appeared in the flesh, rather than a distilled and distant statistic in a research survey.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, when the market for high school and college percussion instruments began to expand and rock and roll was taking the world of music by storm, Armand continued his focus on the marketplace, by attending conferences and trade shows to promote more creative uses for the cymbal among school music directors and band leaders.He also continued to build what is today called "strategic alliances" with their popular musician clientele.Promoting the cymbal meant not just growth in sales but further refinement and elaboration of the product line.It proved a shrewd strategy because, as noted earlier, additional market niches were created for the core product, uses that hadn't existed before.

In fact, it was Armand Zildjian's creative approach to product promotion and development, through intense involvement of end-users in the process, that led to the reconfigured use of cymbals, from the restricted hand-held instrument of the 19th century, and also antiquity, to the integrated drum and cymbal "percussion station" popularized first by jazz and swing musicians, using their feet as well as hands.

Just as a passion for quality explains the intense concern with the technical enhancement of the cymbal--its quality of sound--he family's passionfor continuity and survival explains, I believe, its missionary marketing approach, its zealotry in promoting the product. Certainly, all business owners want to keep abreast of market developments.But most incline to the commonsense rule that it's best to stick close to the home office and plant, to make sure everything is in order and people are doing their jobs.

If you want to know what's happening in the market, watch the sales receipts as they come in and adjust production accordingly.Make changes to the product in response to customer complaints or concerns, after customers inform you by letter or phone.But to hunker down in a jazz dive or nightclub in a distant city three hundred or a thousand miles away, to meet with musicians using the product? That style of reaching out to the market might strike many business owners as a frivolous waste of their time.

Yet that approach to product development and promotion--and the passion behind it--made the vital difference for the Zildjian family in United States.

Like many themes in the Zildjian story, this, too, has a strong historical connection.The active reaching out from the home office and plant to where the action was--which is to say, where the musicians were--that characterized the entrepreneurial Avedis III's survival strategy, and his son Armand's growth strategy, had also been the marketing mode favored by 19th Century, Avedis II.

In the mid-19th Century, a century during which world trade fairs were becoming increasingly popular, Avedis Zildjian II built a schooner for the express purpose of taking his product out on the Mediterranean and Atlantic sealanes.Sailing in 1851 from Constantinople to Marseilles and then on to London, he showcased Zildjian cymbals at the London world trade fair.Both that year, and again a decade later in 1862, Zildjian cymbals won the top awards for excellence at both the Paris and London fairs.

Did Avedis II hobnob with the musicians of his day?That we don't know because the family's archives for the 19th century do not capture enough detail of Avedis II's business promotion travels.But, given the family's passion for the product, it would not be surprising if Avedis II found his way to the musical locales in London and Paris where cymbals were being used--or watched the band of her Majesty Queen Victoria's Royal Cold Stream Guards to see what role percussion played in their band!

As an example of this promotional trait, there is a quite literal--not just figurative--sense in which the family sought to improve the visibility of the product in the marketplace.With the emergence of televised football games, school marching bands became a prominent part of the half-time ceremonies.Avedis III and his sons Armand and Robert were quick to spot this development.They made sure the Zildjian cymbal would not only "sound out" but would also "stand out" by developing a new coatingprocess that improved the cymbal's brilliance to the eyes--just as process innovations throughout the years had brought a unique brilliance to the ears of those in theaudience.

Best Practice Before Academics Had the Labels Ready

Viewed as a case of business passion, of a fervent concern for both the quality of the product and the development of new market opportunities, what else can the Zildjian case teach us?

I believe that the most important lesson is how passion in enterprise can drive founders and their heirs to catch marketplace waves before they crest, indeed, help them to drivethe market forward, and not just wait for the quarterly sales figures to provide the "feedback" on which new business judgments must be made--the traditional way most businesses plan.

Most of the contemporary 20th century innovations in the cymbal, among them the "splash," "crash," "hi-hat" and "sizzle," came from the passionate and synergistic dialogue between the family, as manufacturer, and the musicians, as users, whose passion for quality in their musical performances matched the Zildjians' passion for quality in production. Call it an artistic additive to the traditional science-laboratory R&D format for product development.

Without consciouslystrategizing the concept,the Avedis Zildjian Company can be viewed as an early forerunner of the contemporary product development revolution in manufacturing, whereby marketing and production work hand-in-hand from the start of the new product development cycle, and use customer and other focus groups to shape the product at the very earliest stage.By the 1960's, as a result of the rapid growth of the business, this family began employing clinicians expressly for the purpose of attending trade show conferences for dealers and distributors.

Of course, best business practices are often carried on without the business owner knowing, or even needing, an elegant academic concept to describe how he or she is competently running the family company!Many business leaders intuitively understand what they are doing although they may be hard put to give their practice a label--whether it's "business process improvement," "TQM," "product re-positioning," or "qualitative market research."Many have engaged in such best practices for decades, long before such practices were validated by business school academics as certified Best Practice!