Family

What a landmark genetics study can teach enterprising families about nature, nurture, and the stories they tell about each other.A new Nature study of over a million people found that common genetic variants account for roughly 5 to 9 percent of the differences in personality traits like openness and conscientiousness. For enterprising families, where personality often shapes who gets trusted with leadership and ownership, the finding offers a more precise, if modest, piece of the nature versus nurture picture. It does not tell a family who should lead. It does suggest that the labels families use for one another, "the responsible one," "the entrepreneur," "not leadership material," deserve more scrutiny than they usually get.

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.

This month we mark National Family Owned and Operated Businesses Day, and the phrase rewards a second look. We celebrate the business, and rightly so. The business may be the source of wealth, the center of identity, the training ground for leadership, and the shared project that connects generations. Behind many of these enterprises are remarkable stories: founders and families who began with almost nothing and built something lasting through years of work, risk, and sacrifice.But the wealth a business creates does not stay inside it. Over time it takes other forms: liquidity, portfolios, real estate, trusts, foundations, direct investments, philanthropy, and new ventures. It also includes wealth that never appears on a balance sheet at all: a family's knowledge, judgment, relationships, reputation, and capacity to make decisions together. The organization a family builds to hold all of that is the family office.It is usually described as a structure for managing wealth. True, but incomplete. A systematic review published this year helps widen the frame. Reviewing 60 peer-reviewed studies published between 1980 and 2024, Siaba, Rivera, and Currais argue that the family office is better understood not only as a service platform but as a governance structure that mediates among the family, the business, and the wealth.

This month we mark National Family Owned and Operated Businesses Day, and the phrase rewards a second look. We celebrate the business, and rightly so. The business may be the source of wealth, the center of identity, the training ground for leadership, and the shared project that connects generations. Behind many of these enterprises are remarkable stories: founders and families who began with almost nothing and built something lasting through years of work, risk, and sacrifice.But the wealth a business creates does not stay inside it. Over time it takes other forms: liquidity, portfolios, real estate, trusts, foundations, direct investments, philanthropy, and new ventures. It also includes wealth that never appears on a balance sheet at all: a family's knowledge, judgment, relationships, reputation, and capacity to make decisions together. The organization a family builds to hold all of that is the family office.It is usually described as a structure for managing wealth. True, but incomplete. A systematic review published this year helps widen the frame. Reviewing 60 peer-reviewed studies published between 1980 and 2024, Siaba, Rivera, and Currais argue that the family office is better understood not only as a service platform but as a governance structure that mediates among the family, the business, and the wealth.