Family Office

This piece closes the loop on a year of Family Enterprise Insights by naming the common thread beneath our 2025 research: trust as infrastructure.

Most families assume wealth is lost through dramatic failures—a bad investment, a misjudged expansion, an unexpected crisis. But new research from Columbia Business School reveals something more subtle and far more consequential: long-term wealth is shaped by the small, ordinary decisions families make repeatedly over time. How often you rebalance. When you recognize gains or losses. Whether your advisors follow a disciplined process or react emotionally. These quiet choices—not portfolio size—explain why some families steadily compound wealth across generations while others slowly fall behind. This article explores the unseen mechanisms that drive long-run outcomes and offers tools to help families examine the habits, systems, and governance structures that support true resilience.

Young Columbia Business School alumni leaders across the globe and from diverse industries shared their thoughts and insights on how to best position themselves in their family businesses. They also gave students invaluable advice on what they can do now to pave a successful path for themselves at their family businesses in the future.

The panelists on this session gave us an inside look at the missions and family dynamics in family offices. They spoke about some of the difficulties of keeping younger family members engaged as family businesses grow, and also highlighted some things to consider when deciding who should run a family’s office and how they should do it.

Husband and wife Bram Bluestein ’71 and Ilene Gordon joined the Global Family Enterprise Program in 2019 for “Making It Work: Two Careers, One Family, and a Lasting Legacy.” In this clip, they discuss setting up their family office and involving the next generation in the business.