Family Enterprise Insights

Are We Protecting the Business, or Protecting It From Growth?A new study of 247 Swiss family firms, published this year in the Journal of the International Council for Small Business, offers a sharp finding: as family ownership grows more concentrated, financial goals tend to grow more conservative. That's not always a failure of ambition. Often it's a family protecting things a balance sheet can't measure, independence, identity, control. But the researchers found ambitious goals were the strongest predictor of stronger performance, which raises the real question: is your caution a deliberate choice, or has it simply become the default? This month's entertainment feature picks up the same tension, three generations deep.

A World Cup final compresses years of effort into seconds. A 250th anniversary stretches decades into centuries. Family enterprises operate within both registers of time, required to act decisively in moments of consequence while remaining accountable to decisions whose effects unfold across generations. Major anniversaries surface this tension directly, prompting not merely a reckoning with what an enterprise has survived, but a deliberate choice about which version of its founder, and of itself, it will continue to remember. Drawing on Paul Morrow's centennial research, a study by Börje Boers and Andrea Calabrò, and the Hénokiens, this piece considers what history is ultimately for.

A Reflection on the 2026 CBS Family Enterprise Conference: Legacying TogetherFriday, April 17thColumbia Business School

A global survey of 525 family firm decision-makers across 21 countries finds that founder identity, whether Missionary or Darwinian, shapes philanthropic behavior across generations. Missionary founders, driven by social purpose, produce giving that grows stronger over time as their legacy is idealized and absorbed into family identity. Darwinian founders, motivated by competitive logic, engage in more reputational giving that can shift with other priorities. Transgenerational control intentions further complicate the picture: families focused on succession may quietly redirect philanthropic energy inward. For advisors, the implication is clear: identity, not just structure, determines whether family giving becomes a lasting legacy or a secondary priority. Read the full article, What Our Giving Says About Us, and explore the Richards & Kammerlander study in Family Business Review.