Cynthia Scott and Dennis Jaffe
A Co-Preneurial Couple
I met Dennis Jaffe recently when he presented as part of a family business advisory course I was completing. Knowing his reputation as a family business expert, I reached out afterwards to see if he’d be willing to answer a few questions about working with people you love.
He went one better, he introduced me to his wife, Cynthia Scott Ph.D. M.P.H.
Cynthia and Dennis have been working together, on and off, for 42 years, and have co-authored around a dozen books. Their most recent, Living Your Values, brought them back together as writing partners after a break of about a decade.
Both have spent their careers studying people, organisations and change. Cynthia is a clinical psychologist, executive coach and Professor Emeritus of Leadership whose work has focused on transformational culture change, leadership development and behavioural resilience. Dennis is a sociologist, organisational psychologist and internationally recognised family business expert.
While her credentials are impressive (and if I’m honest a little intimidating), within a few minutes of talking to Cynthia, I realised she wasn’t formidable in the way I’d expected. She is smart and sparky, funny, curious and constantly making connections. There’s a natural instinctiveness there, alongside a generous desire to share knowledge.
One of the ideas we discussed during our chat, was the Four Rooms model, developed by family business advisers Josh Baron and Rob Lachenauer. It imagines a family enterprise as a house containing four distinct spaces: the family room, owner room, board room and management room. Each has different people in it, different decisions to make and different rules for how those decisions get made.
Cynthia and Dennis use that thinking very practically. Sometimes they have to stop and clarify which room they are actually in. Are they talking as a couple? Making a decision as owners? Talking strategy? Dealing with something concerning their children?
That clarity becomes especially useful when work and life are as intertwined as theirs have been. Dennis might walk into Cynthia’s office and start a conversation, for example, and she needs to know whether he is there to talk business or discuss what they are doing at the weekend. It’s a practice that she thinks would be very useful for other co-preneurial couples.
In their relationship there are literal rooms too. Cynthia has her office upstairs. Dennis has his downstairs. Historically, they have been careful not to interfere with one another’s spaces, however, Dennis has lately complicated the arrangement by migrating into the kitchen.
The kitchen, in Cynthia’s view, is couple space. It is where they cook, eat and hang out. She tells me with a knowing smile that is not where Dennis should be conducting conference calls while she attempts to reach the toaster without appearing in the background of his meeting,
Listening to Cynthia I was struck by how much self-awareness this kind of partnership requires. It is one thing to understand that different conversations belong in different rooms. It is another to notice when you have carried the emotion, authority or expectations of one room into another. Working with someone you love asks you to regulate yourself, decipher what kind of conversation is needed and communicate that clearly enough for the other person to move with you. It’s not as easy as it sounds to jump from a conversation about working at the kitchen table to one about the P&L, without bringing the emotion with you. Truly knowing yourself is a great asset.
Perhaps with their backgrounds in social science and psychology, Cynthia and Dennis had a bit of a head start. That shared curiosity has been there from the beginning, and it was also what first brought them together at a conference more than four decades ago.
It soon became part of their working relationship too. Dennis suggested they write a book together, a strategy Cynthia jokes may have been his way of getting her to work with him. Their early writing involved what she calls “duelling Macintoshes”, passing chapters backwards and forwards, later accompanied by her red pen and his green one.
She describes Dennis as the more instinctive storyteller and herself as the person likely to create the framework, the boxes and arrows and the practical architecture around an idea. Cynthia makes the observation that lots of people want to be an author, but far fewer want to sit down on a Saturday afternoon and actually write the book – that becomes doubly hard when you’re sharing domestic roles as well.
In fact, much of co-preneurship carries this tension. There are freedoms in building a business together, including the ability to make choices around family that conventional careers may not allow. Sometimes what you are unwilling to sacrifice helps shape the business in the first place: time with children instead of time spent commuting, for example. But there are plenty of other sacrifices along the way. Evenings, weekends, predictability, income, personal space and, at times, the opportunity for both people to pursue what they want at exactly the same moment.
Cynthia comes back repeatedly to two questions: “What’s needed now?” and “What time is this for us?”
Those questions leave room for a partnership to change rather than insisting on perfect symmetry.
At one point Dennis moved increasingly into family business work while Cynthia kept their existing management consultancy going. She is candid that both of them were ready for change, but Dennis got there first. Later she moved into major corporate change and leadership roles, sustainability work and academia, while Dennis became increasingly established in the family enterprise field.
They spent years doing work apart before their professional interests began converging again.
Their latest work on values seems a fitting place to have come back together. Cynthia says she and Dennis did not formally agree their values at the beginning. They learnt them through stories, arguments, decisions and years of observing what each cared enough to protect. They still revisit and recalibrate them now. Another vital tip for people working with loved ones.
After 42 years of working together, apart and together again, Cynthia and Dennis probably have a better grasp on how to make it work than most.
The secret? They have become very practised at noticing which room they are in.
By Siân Jones
Learn more about Cynthia and Dennis's latest work here: https://thevaluesedge.com