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Editorials
Lessons in Link v. Link
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4/30/2008 |
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The fight for control of Link Snack Foods, scheduled for trial later this month at the Washburn County Court House in Shell Lake, stands out in the current round of corporate takeovers.
While thousands of jobs hang in the balance with hostile raider Carl Icahn’s latest mischief at Motorola, and Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo!, both disputes are of the bloodless variety, strictly about business.
No so in Link Snack Foods v. Jay Link. This is about a very public breakdown of a multi-generational business family that had managed to keep its personal affairs private, until now. How did it happen?
File 2005-CV-127 is full of anecdotal evidence, suggesting a future case study for a think tank or business school. The court record includes a stream of charges and countercharges that could have inspired episodes for at least another year of “Dallas,” the 1980s CBS series loosely-based on another dysfunctional family, the larger-than-life Hunts of Texas.
Minong’s John E.“Jack” Link, the family patriarch, fired Jay, the older of his two sons, on May 26, 2005. It was Jay’s 36th birthday. Jack kept him on the company payroll for an additional two months, however. And even as their business relationship was dying, he loaned his renegade son $2 million to help him finish a $10 million lake home he was building near Minong. As late as Dec. 20, 2007, Jay hadn’t begun to repay that loan.
The file also includes complaints that must seem plain bizarre to the 350 employees at the Link flagship, and the larger Minong area community. Amid their adversarial deliberations over restructuring the family business, lawyers were filing claims and counterclaims over allegations that Jay was sneaking onto Link Snack Foods’ private hunting preserve to shoot ducks.
This Link saga is a wake up call for other troubled families running family businesses.
John Hermeier, the company’s chief financial officer, may have said it best in a BusinessNorth interview last September: “It’s all about family ... this is a tragedy.”
Previous Editorials Articles:- Lessons in Link v. Link -4/30/2008
- Minnesota workers’ comp reform: Let’s get the job done -4/30/2008
- Time to eliminate JOBZ -4/9/2008
- Communicating with confidence: The most transferable skill in the 21st century -3/18/2008
- Frankenstein is not the monster -3/12/2008
