But they have to get the successions right.
In response to the gradual erosion of their main selling point, Mr Kelly and his colleagues have begun offering their services as consultants on other aspects of employment, helping firms keep their best staff and manage successions.
In America the Mormons have created many highly successful family companies, such as Marriott (hotels) and Huntsman (energy).Lastly, family businesses offer scope for unlikely successions.
It would be best if that popularity were properly tested by referendums, perhaps at the time of successions.
As Mr Berezovsky and Mr Khodorkovsky discovered, presidential successions (if there is a succession) can be risky.
In recent months, there has been a rash of failed successions at blue-chip firms, from Coca-Cola to Gillette.
A study of CEO succession in 2002 at 2,500 big publicly traded companies around the world by Booz Allen Hamilton, a consultancy, found that two out of five of all chief-executive successions that year were "involuntary, performance-related turnover"—or, to put it bluntly, sackings for underachievement.
On October 14th the European Commission unveiled guidelines for successions involving assets in more than one EU country.
Barbara Willenbacher, a German academic, notes that such zealots as Robespierre and Saint-Just made state control of successions a keystone of the French revolution.
But for every example of good planning there are dozens of botched successions.
The country has lots of fine family-owned companies run by dynamic managers, but on average family firms perform worse than others: a study of successions in 229 firms by the Bank of Italy found that returns diminished in companies where the owner's heir took charge and increased under new bosses unrelated to the founder.Like too many other businesses, the café operates largely in cash.
