Creating Wealth in Family Firms Through Managing Resources: Comments and Extensions‪.‬

Sirmon and Hitt (2003) do an excellent job of describing the pivotal role that resources unique to a family firm can play in a company's survival and success. Grounded in the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm, their article maps how these firm-unique resources affect the efficacy of resource management through which a family firm may leverage its resources to achieve a competitive advantage. Aside from showing how the RBV can improve our understanding of a family firm, the article articulates and defines the various managerial roles and challenges in evaluating, adding, shedding, bundling, and leveraging resources. We believe that this approach makes the RBV more accessible to managers, overcoming a common criticism of the theory (Priem & Butler, 2001). This commentary has two purposes. First, it seeks to extend the contributions of the authors by considering how family influences on strategy formulation will affect a firm's competitive strategy to leverage resources. The goal is to highlight additional important research issues that arise from applying the RBV to the study of family businesses. Second, it expands the applicable boundaries of the RBV set forth by the authors to include family firms for whom wealth creation may not be the sole or primary goal.