Take me back to the very beginning. What did the Program look like when you started, and what gap were you trying to fill?
It all started with Michael Preston’s class, Managing the Growing Company. Michael had built the course around his own experience, and it was about how to develop the company itself, not just how to get financing.
By chance, I was an early guest speaker in his Family Business Management course [the first elective focused specifically on family enterprise]. I came in to talk about estate planning, and it was a huge hit because students realized they needed to think beyond the business to truly understand the subject. Soon after that, I launched Family Enterprise and Wealth as our second dedicated class. From the beginning, we sought to educate all MBA students, not just those from a business-owning family.
I think the gap we were filling is one that many business schools still have today: the emphasis on management loses sight of ownership, which is really where the ultimate fate of a business lies.
This was a ground-up movement within Columbia Business School — an entrepreneurial venture forged through a partnership between faculty and students, because the need was there.
What did you hope students would walk away with? Has that hope held up, or evolved?
From the beginning, my motivation was twofold. First, to raise awareness of the importance of family enterprise, which is the heart of the economy and society. That requires understanding ownership and the importance of the family behind it. And second, to demystify family ownership and offer a more nuanced way of thinking about it.
Understanding how co-owning, co-managing, and overseeing something together affects your family relationships — and how your family relationships affect those things in turn — is what I want students to walk away with, along with the ability to see what’s around them all the time: family enterprises, including family businesses, family offices, and charitable ventures.
I’m always pleased when students come back and say, “Oh my gosh, everything we talked about in class, I’m living every day.”
You were central to renaming the Program from Family Business to Global Family Enterprise. What was the thinking behind that shift?
Several factors made the Global Family Enterprise Program the right name for what we were delivering. First, CBS is a global school, one of the most global business schools in the world, so “global” was important to signal that this was a universal issue.
Second, we wanted to emphasize that we were looking at the entire enterprise, not just a single operating business. By changing the name, we were telling the world that CBS understood the universality of these issues, and that our work extended beyond the original business.
You developed the Family Enterprise and Wealth course. What was the core problem or question you built that curriculum around?
The way I saw it, Michael Preston’s Family Business Management class went deep on business issues: succession, management, non-family management, all of that. Mine went broad — not just the business, but what’s beyond it: wealth management, family offices, philanthropy. My class focuses more on ownership than a business management class does, and it looks closely at the family behind it.
I look at things through questions, and I want students to leave with questions.
The key question is: Why does this matter? It matters because of the consolidation of wealth over the last couple of decades in particular, which means a small number of families now control a huge percentage of the world’s resources. In the complex family enterprises I teach about, what happens at the family and ownership levels impacts employees, customers, tax policy, and more — it impacts everything.
One of the things I want people to go away with is that family business itself is neither good nor bad — it’s the reality of what we deal with.
The reality — and part of why I think the Global Family Enterprise name matters — is that ownership is increasingly held jointly among family members. So those were also the questions I wanted students to ask: Who owns it? Who has what authority? And what are the implications for everyone around them?
The Nordic immersion class (Global Immersion: Nordic Family Enterprise) has been such a distinctive piece of the Program. How did that come about, and what were you hoping students would experience there that they couldn’t get in a classroom?
I was asked whether I wanted to teach a global immersion course, and I immediately chose the Nordic region. It gives students the opportunity to study stakeholdership, sustainability, innovation, and, of course, family enterprise in a region that excels in all of them.
The Nordics have been at the cutting edge of sustainability for a long time. Students come away from the course saying, “Wow, it’s not just an add-on — it’s embedded.”
Stakeholdership has become an interesting topic of discussion in business schools and in business, and the Nordic system is an excellent laboratory for seeing it in action. The Nordic industrial foundation model combines nonprofit and for-profit characteristics that the rest of the world has only recently begun adopting.
As Professor Joseph Stiglitz has noted, the Nordics are a highly innovative ecosystem, for reasons that defy expectations.
The other key part of the class was being in the room with family owners — that was really important.
That immersion piece is something you don’t normally get in a business school environment. In this class, you’re meeting with the families behind these enterprises — some members are owners, some are not. But very often, when I ask students in the first session why they’ve come, they say it’s because these countries are at the top of the global happiness rankings, and they want to know why.
Moving beyond the MBA, you developed two executive education courses designed for families and advisors. What was your inspiration?
Once we had built a solid foundation in the classroom and had a formal program with some administrative support, it was time to meet other needs that were out there. That led to our first executive education offering, an in-person course called Enterprising Families.
The emphasis is different when you have a family owner in the room versus an advisor, so we were able to offer similar content to both but tailor it to each — which is important.
The success of the online course, Family Enterprises and Wealth: Online, has been a surprise to me. It brings our program to the rest of the world and is easily accessible.
Of everything you’ve done here, what did you enjoy most about the relationships: with students, alumni, the families themselves, or colleagues?
I’ve been very fortunate in the people who have been drawn to working in the Global Family Enterprise Program. They combine head and heart, and our growth reflects the collective effort of so many people. We differentiated the school by focusing first on MBA students, which was a gap in the field, and by proactively engaging alumni.
I’ve really enjoyed getting to know students in the classroom, having one-on-one relationships with them, and then keeping some of those relationships over time as they become alumni. From the beginning, I wanted to make sure this wasn’t just “they take a class and they’re gone.”
That was especially important during Covid — a challenging time for everybody, and at CBS it meant switching to online classes. I felt like we were rowing and rowing to keep that boat going, and it paid off, because some of the relationships that developed during Covid were even stronger than the ones that came before.
And the advisory board: I felt really well supported by alumni and others who were committed to education in this area more deeply than anyone had been before. They showed up and generously contributed their time and energy.
Looking at where the Program is now, what feels most true to what you originally envisioned? And what surprised you along the way?
We have always sought to combine head and heart, and I think we’ve succeeded at that. We’ve also stayed true to the original emphasis on students.
As I look ahead, I think the emphasis on education, the emphasis on students, is enduring.
What has surprised me is how hard it is for people to see what’s right in front of them: an increasingly large share of the world’s economy is held by a small number of families. The businesses, investments, assets, and charitable organizations they own and control impact all of us, every day. It still surprises me that family ownership is perceived as unprofessional and small, when the reality is that it ranges from very small to very large, and it’s complex — and it deserves the kind of attention we at CBS have been giving it.