Family Companies: About Hunting and Farming Businesses


Economic activities can be synthesized in man’s most ancestral pursuits: hunting and agriculture.

Family BusinessMan began hunting, in that era he was a nomad and that generated a series of individual and social attitudes and behaviors that accorded to that activity. There are company activities that have the same features of the hunt.

The construction, engineering, consultancy and direct sales are only a few examples of the hunt. The criteria of reality, astuteness and opportunity are the basis of the hunting business.

Man became sedentary when he learned to manage agriculture. Agriculture requires a series of preparatory activities, the availability of land to cultivate, fertilizers, etc.

It requires time management that implies, in traditional farming, preparing the earth, sowing, protecting what has been sown, harvesting and then separating the fruit from the rest of the materials that grow.

There are company activities that have the same features of agriculture. Farming, large-scale manufacturing, passive sales and communications, are only a few examples of the farming business. Adaptation to the environment, tenacity and heavy work are the basis of the farming business.

Obviously, there are variations in this classification, which have to do, for example, with whether it is small-game hunting or big-game hunting. Selling encyclopedias on CDs door-to-door is a small-game hunting activity. Extensive farming is not the same as intensive farming. And so we can find the nuances that mark the actions within a company, and categorize it according to its activity.

Diego Belohlavek

NOTE: The Unicist Research Institute was the pioneer in complexity science research and became a private global decentralized leading research organization in the field of human adaptive systems. http://www.unicist.org