The Henokiens

The Henokiens is an international association of bicentenary family companies. It has 56 members, and the qualifying test is the strictest and most objective in this entire directory: your company has to have survived, in the family, for two centuries.

Who qualifies

Four conditions, all published and all mandatory.

The company must be at least two hundred years old. Where the legal form or the line of business has changed over that time, what matters is that a capital link with the original company has been retained.

Descendants of the founder must own at least 50% of the capital or the voting rights. Family members must be part of the management of the company. And the company must be in good financial health, so this is not a heritage register for firms coasting on a name.

The membership is concentrated in Europe and Japan: Italy and France with fifteen companies each, Japan with ten, Switzerland five, Germany three, Belgium, the Netherlands and Austria two apiece, and England and Portugal one each.

That distribution says something in itself. Two hundred years of continuous family ownership requires not just good management but a country whose property rights, inheritance law and borders survived the same period, which is why the list looks as it does.

How membership works

There is no application route in the ordinary sense, because either you meet the four conditions or you do not. Fewer than sixty companies worldwide are known to qualify and be members. The association publishes no fees.

For almost every reader of this directory, membership is not the point. This entry is here because the organisation is the closest thing that exists to a controlled study of what allows a family enterprise to last.

What members get

Annual meetings, visits to each other's companies, and a body of shared thinking on succession and the next generation.

The value of the exchange comes from the shared position. When a chief executive of a company founded in the seventeenth century discusses handing over to the next generation, the counterpart in the room has done it a dozen times. Nobody is speculating about whether a governance structure works across generations; they have watched theirs work, or fail, across ten of them.

The association publishes case studies and reports drawing on that experience, and for a family thinking in centuries rather than quarters, this material has few rivals. Reading what fifty-six companies did to get past year two hundred is more instructive than most of the succession literature written by people who have never seen it happen.