In The Company Of Sisters

The challenge faced by family businesses and their stakeholders, is to recognise the issues that they face, understand how to develop strategies to address them and more importantly, to create narratives, or family stories that explain the emotional dimension of the issues to the family. The most intractable family business issues are not the business problems the organisation faces, but the emotional issues that compound them. Applying psychodynamic concepts will help to explain behaviour and will enable the family to prepare for life cycle transitions and other issues that may arise. Here is a new understanding and a broader perspective on the human dynamics of family firms with two complementary frameworks, psychodynamic and family systematic, to help make sense of family-run organisations. Although this book includes a conceptual section, it is first and foremost a practical book about the real world issues faced by business families. The book begins by demonstrating that many years of achievement through generations can be destroyed by the next, if the family fails to address the psychological issues they face. By exploring cases from famous and less well known family businesses across the world, the authors discuss entrepreneurs, the entrepreneurial family and the lifecycles of the individual and the organisation. They go on to show how companies going through change and transition can avoid the pitfalls that endanger both family and company. The authors then apply tools that will help family businesses in transition and offer their analyses and conclusions. Readers should draw their own conclusions from careful examination of the cases, identifying the problems or dilemmas faced and the options for improved business performance and family relationships. They should ask what they might have done in the given situation and what new insight into individual or family behaviour each case offers. The goal is to avoid a bitter ending.

Insane Sisters is the extraordinary tale of two sisters, Mary Alice Heinbach and Euphemia B. Koller, and their seventeen- year property dispute against the nation's leading cement corporation—the Atlas Portland Cement Company. In 1903, Atlas built a plant on the border of the small community of Ilasco, located just outside Hannibal—home of the infamous cave popularized in Mark Twain's most acclaimed novels. The rich and powerful Atlas quickly appointed itself as caretaker of Twain's heritage and sought to take control of Ilasco. However, its authority was challenged in 1910 when Heinbach inherited her husband's tract of land that formed much of the unincorporated town site. On grounds that Heinbach's husband had been in the advanced stages of alcoholism when she married him the year before, some of Ilasco's political leaders and others who had ties to Atlas challenged the will, charging Heinbach with undue influence. To help fight against the local lawyers and politicians who wanted Atlas to own the land, Heinbach enlisted the help of her shrewd and combative sister, Euphemia Koller, by making her co-owner of the tract. In a complex case that went to the Missouri Supreme Court four times, the sisters fiercely sought to hang on to the tract. However, in 1921 the county probate court imposed a guardianship over Heinbach and a circuit judge ordered a sheriff's sale of the property. After Atlas purchased the tract, Koller waged a lonely battle to overturn the sale and expose the political conspiracies that had led to Ilasco's conversion into a company town. Her efforts ultimately resulted in her court- ordered confinement in 1927 to Missouri's State Hospital Number One for the Insane, where she remained until her death at age sixty-eight. Insane Sisters traces the dire consequences the sisters suffered and provides a fascinating look at how the intersection of gender, class, and law shaped the history and politics of Ilasco. The book also sheds valuable new light on the wider consolidation of corporate capitalism and the use of guardianships and insanity to punish unconventional women in the early twentieth century.

The Andrews Sisters, the legendary singing trio of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s are the most successful female singing group in history and were the world's top selling group until the Beatles arrived. Of the 605 songs they recorded, 113 charted. They also made 18 movies, appeared regularly on radio and television, and entertained three generations of GIs. Based on extensive research, unpublished letters, and interviews with family, friends, and colleagues, this book documents not only the lives and work of the Andrews Sisters but also the popular culture spanned by their long careers. The book contains a complete discography of their released, unreleased, and solo recordings, including recording dates, record numbers, and accompaniment. Also included are a filmography and documentation of their radio and television appearances.

Perfect Piece is a perfectly conceived conclusion to the charming Sisters, Ink series of novels for women. At the heart of each story are four unlikely sisters, each separately adopted into the home of Marilyn and Jack Sinclair where they still meet as adults in their late mother’s attic to work on scrapbook projects and work through life together. The Sinclair sisterhood is about to be rocked from its foundation when Meg—the bedrock sibling most like Momma—collapses with a brain tumor. Surgery removes the invading mass but leaves a sister full of mood swings, depression, anger, and bitterness. Tandy, Kendra, and Joy struggle to find a trace of their formerly happy sister, who always pointed them to life’s positives. Meg’s husband, Jamison, struggles even more. With no idea how to handle the new, unimproved person inhabiting his wife’s body, he finds it too easy to seek solace in the clever conversation of another woman. What none of them realize is that the wisdom they need is already at hand; available

• An anthology of writings by some of the most influential women in history on the often misunderstood and misrepresented female drug experience. • With great honesty, bravery, and frankness, women from diverse backgrounds write about their drug experiences. Women have been experimenting with drugs since prehistoric times, and yet published accounts of their views on the drug experience have been relegated to either antiseptic sociological studies or sensationalized stories splashed across the tabloids. The media has given us an enduring, but inaccurate, stereotype of a female drug user: passive, addicted, exploited, degraded, promiscuous. But the selections in this anthology--penned by such famous names as Billie Holiday, Anais Nin, Maya Angelou, and Carrie Fisher--show us that the real experiences of women are anything but stereotypical. Sisters of the Extreme provides us with writings by women from diverse occupations and backgrounds, from prostitute to physician, who through their use of drugs dared cross the boundaries set by society--often doing so with the hope of expanding themselves and their vision of the world. Whether with LSD, peyote, cocaine, heroine, MDMA, or marijuana, these women have sought to reach, through their experimentation, other levels of consciousness. Sometimes their quests have brought unexpected rewards, other times great suffering and misfortune. But wherever their trips have left them, these women have lived courageously--if sometimes dangerously--and written about their journeys eloquently.

Cal Torncek is the lawyer appointed to represent Victoria Frankel, a young woman accused of using a "lethal cocktail" of birth control pills-a chemical assault-to kill her viable fetus. Torncek has the support of a loving wife and their five children, along with the support of his law partners, Grace Radmond and Mike Baptise. But, due to his fragile health, he needs all the help he can get with the case. If the case is lost, the setback could allow the State to infringe upon women's rights in other ways. It has the possibility to set the ultimate precedent. While fighting for Frankel's rights and her acquittal, Torncek must protect her from an arrogant prosecutor and an obnoxious trial judge. But two questions remain: is Victoria guilty of feticide, or is she well within her rights as a woman? Author James G. Tomka asserts that the Roman Catholic Church is partially responsible for the right-to-privacy decision of Roe v. Wade. But the main case leading up to Roe was Pierce v. Society of the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary. In the powerful and persuasive Society of Sisters, actual law from this specific case, and others, is applied to the fictional prosecution of a self-induced abortion.