In 1972, in Manila, a father asked his daughter, then in her early twenties, to open a department store. The father was Henry Sy Sr., a Chinese immigrant to the Philippines who had started with a...
In 1972, in Manila, a father asked his daughter, then in her early twenties, to open a department store. The father was Henry Sy Sr., a Chinese immigrant to the Philippines who had started with a shoe store; the daughter was Teresita Sy-Coson; and the store, a twenty-thousand-square-meter space considered enormous at the time, became the first SM department store. Over the following decades she helped her father launch the family's first shopping mall, took over the department store unit when it had fewer than ten stores, and stepped down from it in 2010 with the count at forty-two. The Sy family's SM group grew into the largest shopping mall and retail operator in the Philippines, and Sy-Coson into one of the most respected businesswomen in Asia.
So when Sy-Coson talks about whether her own children should join the family business, she is speaking from the inside of the question in every direction: as the heir who did join, as the executive who built, and as the mother watching the next generation approach the same door. Her answer, preserved in The Dragon Network: Inside Stories of the Most Successful Chinese Family Businesses, the 2013 book by A.B. Susanto and Patricia Susanto of the Jakarta Consulting Group, is startling in its plainness. No pleading, no pressure, no assumption. Just a clock. "There are just two milestones: At 25, they have to start working. At 30, they have to make a choice for their future, whether to build their own career or join the company."
Two ages. Two obligations. At twenty-five you must be working, anywhere, at anything real. At thirty you must choose, and the choice is genuinely yours: a career of your own, or the family company. That is the entire framework, and this essay is about why something that short may be the most useful succession sentence in the whole book.
A note on the book itself before we lean on it. The Susantos wrote a consultant's field report on the overseas Chinese family businesses of Southeast Asia, dense with real names and real numbers, and it is a snapshot of 2012 and 2013: at the book's writing, Sy-Coson's three children ranged from their late teens to their mid-twenties, which means both milestones have long since come and gone for them. We are not reporting on how the Sy children chose. We are studying the rule, because the rule travels. And the book has no African material at all; its world is Manila, Jakarta, Bangkok, Singapore. Every application to African and diaspora families here is our translation, and we will say so when we make it.
Consider the question the milestone rule replaces. "Will you take over the business?" is the question hanging over dinner tables from Manila to Kampala to Houston, usually unspoken, always felt, and it is a badly designed question. It has no date, so it is always being asked and can never be settled. It has no default, so silence gets read as an answer, and every family member reads the silence differently. And it is soaked in guilt, because embedded in it is everything the parents sacrificed, which means the honest answer "no" costs the child something no honest answer should cost.
The Dragon Network is unsentimental about what that pressure does. In the Chinese tradition it describes, children are expected to preserve the family legacy, business included, and the decision to join is tangled with obligation to the family, sibling rivalry, and the cold reception that greets a founder's child in the company corridors. The book's wiser families, it turns out, had all converged on the same discovery: the pressure does not work, and something else does. Richard Eu, then chief executive of the venerable health products firm Eu Yan Sang, said in an interview that children would not be forced into the business if they were not interested. Kenny Yap of Qian Hu, the Singapore ornamental fish company, said the future generations should be given the chance to decide for themselves. And Henry Sy Jr., Sy-Coson's brother, described his own method as encouragement rather than force: he took his children along on business trips, let them see the work and its privileges up close, and reported that his eldest child's interest in the business grew on its own.
Notice what all three positions have in common with the milestone rule. They convert an emotional demand into a structured invitation. The door is open, the date is known, and the child walks through it or does not, as an adult, on the record.
Look closely at the design of Sy-Coson's two milestones, because each one is doing precise work.
The first milestone, working by twenty-five, is not about the family business at all. It says: whatever you choose later, you will choose it as someone who has held a job, produced value for strangers, and been evaluated by people who do not love you. The book shows this instinct formalized elsewhere with even harder edges. Ciputra, the Indonesian property magnate, requires third-generation family members to spend at least three years working outside the family business before they may join, and once inside, they are placed according to experience and competence, not surname. The outside years are an apprenticeship in reality. A child who has only ever worked for family does not know what they are worth, and neither does the family.
The second milestone, choosing by thirty, does something subtler: it dignifies the "no." A choice with only one acceptable answer is not a choice, and children can smell the difference at any age. By naming a date and naming both options as legitimate, the rule commits the parents in advance to respecting either outcome. That commitment costs the parents real anguish, and it buys something pressure can never buy: the child who does say yes at thirty says it as a volunteer. The Susantos' book is, among other things, a catalog of what conscripts do to family companies, from quiet incompetence to open war, and the through-line is that a successor who never chose the role never fully carries it.
There is a third piece of design that is easy to miss: the rule is announced years ahead. It is not sprung on a twenty-nine-year-old in a crisis. Everyone grows up knowing the clock, which means the family's expectations and the child's plans can converge slowly, without a single dramatic confrontation. The deadline does the confronting, gently, on schedule.
We would be dishonest, and so would this essay, if we presented the tradition that produced the milestone rule as a clean inheritance. The same Confucian-influenced culture the Susantos document also carried a strong presumption that sons, especially eldest sons, take the leadership post, with daughters privileged below them. The book reports this pattern as description and does not spend much energy condemning it, so we will spend the energy here: it is a flaw, it wastes half of every generation's talent, and the book's own case studies are the proof.
Because the most instructive thing about the 25/30 rule is who wrote it. Teresita Sy-Coson rose in a tradition that did not expect her to lead, and she has been frank about the tax she paid, saying she had to work harder and smarter to battle the assumption that she had merely inherited her position. "You have to really prove yourself to get respect," she said. Of her own role she is almost self-erasing: "I was not meant to lead the group. Even now I am not leading; I maintain the core." Meanwhile Ciputra, asked about successors, said plainly that gender is not a consideration; qualification is. The families in this book that thrived across generations are disproportionately the ones that quietly abandoned the sons-first default. So when you adapt the milestone rule for your own family, adopt it whole: the ages, the choice, and the explicit understanding that it applies to daughters and sons identically, first-born and last-born alike. Anything less imports the tradition's weakness along with its wisdom.
Here we leave the book's territory, as promised. Nothing that follows is in The Dragon Network; it is our translation into the family lives we write for.
Many African families run an unwritten version of the succession question, and it is usually harsher than the Manila version because it comes with a designated conscript: the firstborn, or the son, or the child who "did well in school," who is assumed from childhood to be the one who will take the shop, the farm, the transport business, the family's weight. Nobody asks, because asking would imply the answer could be no. The diaspora runs a second version: parents abroad build a business or property back home, brick by remitted brick, on the silent assumption that a child will one day return to run it, while the child, raised in Ohio or London, has never once been asked whether that life is theirs. In both versions the question stays open for decades, the guilt compounds annually, and the decision finally gets made by default, resentment, or funeral.
The milestone rule translates cleanly onto both, and you do not need a conglomerate to use it. You need two ages and the nerve to announce them. By twenty-five, our child works, anywhere: employed, apprenticed, building their own thing, but producing value outside the family's shelter. At thirty, our child chooses, and we will honor either answer: join what the family is building, or build elsewhere and remain fully loved, fully family, fully welcome. Say it when they are fifteen. Repeat it, calmly, so often it becomes furniture. The rule protects the child from a lifetime of ambient pressure, and it protects you from the harder fate the book documents in family after family: an heir who arrived by guilt and stayed to wreck what obligation could not teach them to love.
And attach the money to the milestones. This is where a principle becomes a mechanism. Vague inheritance promises breed exactly the ambiguity the rule exists to kill, so let the family's resources move on the same clock the expectations do. In LegacyPot, a Legacy Pot can be set up for each child with releases tied to the family's declared milestones rather than to a parent's death: a portion that unlocks at the first milestone, when they start their working life, and a portion at the second, funding whichever choice they make, the family venture or their own. Money that arrives on a published schedule teaches the same lesson the rule does: this family runs on announced commitments, not on leverage.
Here is the one thing to do this month. Write your family's two milestones, and put real ages on them. They do not have to be twenty-five and thirty; they have to be definite, announced years in advance, and identical for every child regardless of gender or birth order. Milestone one: the age by which each child must be working, anywhere, with the family's blessing to work outside. Milestone two: the age of the choice, with both answers spoken aloud as honorable. Then tell the children, at an age when the deadline is still a distant friendly thing rather than an ambush, and tell them again every year.
If there is a family business, add Ciputra's clause: outside experience first, placement by competence after. If there is not, the rule still stands, because what it actually transmits has nothing to do with any particular shop. It transmits the difference between an heir and a volunteer. Sy-Coson, who was both, built forty-two department stores from ten and still described herself as merely maintaining the core. That is what a volunteer sounds like. The clock is how you raise one.