I believe that this view is both wrong and dangerously misleading

David Landes in Dynasties, page xi.

. . . today's prevalent economic thinking has chosen to ignore the family firm as a subject of serious study and has all but written it off as obsolete and inconsequential. I believe that this view is both wrong and dangerously misleading.

Wrong because statistics show us that the great majority of the world's enterprises today are family firms. In the European Union, family firms make up 60-90 percent of businesses, depending on the country, and they account for two thirds of GNP and jobs. In the United States in the mid-1990s, more than 90 percent of firms were family units, accounting for more than half the country's goods and services; further, one third of the Fortune 500 (the country's five hundred largest firms) were said to be family controlled or to have founding families involved in management. What's more, these family firms tended to be the best performers, far outpacing on average their managerial (non-family) competitors.