interior Planning Whether the firm is a private company or a public one, the founder, or the founder's descendants, still exercises control. There immediately arises the question of size. It is clear that very different management considerations arise in the case of a British company like Cadbury Bros Ltd employing many thousands of people a business keenly interested in its family responsibilities-from those in a small engineering works employing three hundred people and run by a father and son. If management's aim is to secure a high degree of work satisfaction for its employees, in addition to good trading results (in any case the two should go hand in hand), the size of the operation presents different problems. This matter of work satisfaction depends to quite an extent on size, and the larger the firm the more difficult it is to achieve that sense of sharing and belonging among employees which is today accepted both as a basic psychological need and vital to effective management. A large family owned firm is in much the same position as a business of corporate ownership; its management has a plain duty to employees to ensure that the job is worth doing, and it usually has the resources to carry out what is required, always provided that the requirements are measured and understood. Because of its size, it is forced to use a good deal of professional management. But there are less and less large familyowned businesses left in existence today. Taxation, death duties, and rationalization have brought about the reorganization of many firms which, a generation back, were distinguished by men of immense prestige and personality. Austin, Morris, Lever hulme, and Melchett are now the names of shadowy figures who have been replaced by forbidding initials like B.M.G. and I.C.I, or manufactured words like Unilever. The trend, though melancholy, is inevitable in modem conditions. It is, however, in the galaxy of middle and smallsized businesses that there is still a great number of predominately familyowned firms which have been sustained by the prudent counsel of legal and taxation advisers, and which are protected from the worst depredations of the Inland Revenue. It would seem that the family owners have to make a serious decision. Will they accept the management responsibility, generation by generation, and see it through themselves, or do they see their role as benign heads of the concern, showing themselves as occasion demands, supplying an often welcome form of benevolence and paternalism and leaving the management to experts? In the first case the acceptance of management responsibility by the family owners there is little question but that the quality of management tends to become diluted as generation succeeds generation. Except in rare cases the fine fervour which typified the founder's approach to the development of the firm, a fervour which was often compounded of inventive genius and idealism and which was underwritten by an ardent desire to make money, has evaporated. Household