Before the beginning

Michael’s path began at NYU, where he studied under Peter Drucker, widely regarded as the father of modern management. It was Drucker who put a name to the work Michael was already doing at the Bell System. “That’s what I do,” Drucker told him. “That’s called management consulting.”

Michael went on to a long career at Grant Thornton, rising to regional partner overseeing consulting practices across 13 offices in the East. The vast majority of his clients, he found, were “small and medium-sized companies, often family-owned.” The MBAs he recruited, however, had been trained on cases about large corporations like IBM and GE. “That wasn’t my life,” he said. He began training them himself, focusing on “understanding the owners, and understanding the ownership,” and later co-authored a book on the subject for the firm. The book sparked a new idea: “This would make a great course.”

Michael brought the concept to Murray Low, then leading the School’s entrepreneurship area, who saw the fit immediately. The result was Managing the Growing Company, which Michael taught at CBS for close to 30 years. A hallmark of the course was its guest speakers, often the same practitioners returning year after year: “people that had a great story.”

The formal beginning

Over time, a pattern emerged. Many of the students drawn to Managing the Growing Company came from family businesses that needed to be professionalized or taken to the next stage. As co-founder Patricia Angus later put it, they needed to figure out “how to make that nascent acorn grow into an oak tree.”

Around the same time, a guest speaker introduced Michael to Ken Preston, who taught a family business course at NYU. The two were no relation and, Michael noted, “could have been from more different backgrounds than you could imagine,” but they quickly became colleagues, speaking in each other’s classes.

When Ken prepared to retire, he asked whether Michael would bring a family business course to Columbia. With student demand already evident in his own classroom, Michael agreed. NYU briefly courted him as well, but Columbia was home, and Family Business Management launched at CBS.

Among the course’s early guest speakers was Patricia Angus. Her session on estate planning resonated with students, who were beginning to see that the issues they faced extended well beyond the business itself. She soon proposed a course of her own: where Michael’s went deep on managing the business, hers would go broad, into wealth, ownership, and the family behind it. “It was like, wow!” Michael recalled. “This is right up my alley. It’s like a perfect match.”

From there, the effort grew. As the team expanded to include dedicated staff, Michael, Patricia, and Professor Daniel Wolfenzon worked with the School to form the Family Business Program Advisory Board, which soon counted about a dozen members. In partnership with the student-run Family Business Club, the Program also launched an annual conference, which Michael calls “the real opening gun of a family business program.”

Attendance exceeded every expectation. “We thought we could have 20, 30 people, and we were having like 120,” he said. Family business clubs at peer schools, including NYU, began to take part. “We started to see that this was a need that was unmet.”

Where the light went on

For Michael, two moments in particular clarified the purpose of the work. The first came through C. Scott Wo ’91, whom Michael met when Scott returned to campus for his 25th reunion in 2016. Scott soon joined the advisory board and began flying in from Honolulu to take part in the class. Afterward, he told Michael, “I would do anything to get involved in this program. Anything.” Family business was the story of Scott’s own life, and he had never encountered anyone who had broken it into its component parts. “That was another thrilling point,” Michael said, “to get a guy that I really respected and admired, and him saying, this is terrific.”

Scott began as a guest speaker, co-taught the course with Michael the following year, and went on to develop his own course, Finance in the Family Firm, which he has now taught for eight years.

The second came from a longtime guest speaker whose father had built a successful family business. After her father passed away, she returned to speak to the class once more. “There wasn’t a dry eye in the house,” Michael recalled.

The experience crystallized what the field is really about. “It’s not just the business,” he said. “It’s the business and the family and the family connections. Dare I say it, love?” Over the years, a number of students came to his office in tears, and he did his best “to be wise and helpful” as they worked through it.

Many of those guest speakers, including Amy Binder ’94 and Ken Fuirst ’90, went on to join the advisory board and continue to speak to students today.

A whole field of study

Michael has since retired from teaching but remains on the advisory board, where he has watched new leadership bring a fresh perspective to the Program. That vantage point has reinforced a conviction he developed over time. “I started out thinking about a course, and then a family business program, but this is a whole field of study,” he said.

In his view, that field sits at the intersection of management, “the Peter Drucker stuff,” and the human dynamics of working alongside family. “It’s not just quantitative, or just organizational structure or systems,” he said. “It’s the integration of the two.”

Reflecting on the support the Program draws today, he added simply, “It’s so exciting for me.”

For those carrying the work forward, he offers one lesson drawn from decades in the classroom and on study trips abroad: “Talking to the owners is the most important thing. Talking to management is not the most important thing. You have to talk to the owners.”