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 created a class based on his experience that was really about how to develop the company itself, not just how to get financing.
By chance, I was a guest speaker early on. I came in to talk about estate planning, and it was a huge hit, because the students realized that they need to think beyond the business to truly understand the subject. Soon after that, I launched Family Enterprise & 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 it was filling is a gap that many business schools, even to this day, have — the emphasis on management loses the focus on 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?
My motivation from the beginning was first, to raise awareness of the importance of family enterprise: the heart of the economy and society. This requires understanding ownership and the importance of the family behind ownership. And second, to demystify and provide a more nuanced approach to families and ownership.
Understanding how co-owning, co-managing, and overseeing something together impacts your family relationships — and how your family relationships impact that as well — is what I want students to walk away with. Along with being able to see what’s around them all the time: family enterprises, including family business, family offices, and charitable ventures.
I’ve been 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?
There were several factors that made the Global Family Enterprise Program the appropriate name for what we were delivering. One, CBS is a global school — one of the most global business schools in the world. So “global” was important to send the message that this was a universal issue.
Secondly, we wanted to emphasize that we are looking at the entire enterprise, not just a single operating business. By changing it to the Global Family Enterprise Program, we were sending a message to the world that CBS understood the universality of these issues, and that it was beyond the original business.
You developed the Family Enterprise and Wealth course. What was the core problem or question you built that curriculum around?
Basically, the way I saw it was: Michael Preston’s Family Business Management class went deep on business issues, including succession and management, non-family management, all of that. Mine went broad: not just the business, but what’s beyond the business. That’s wealth management, family office, philanthropy. My class focuses more on ownership than business management class, and heavily looks at the at the family behind it.
The way I look at things is through questions, and I want students to go away with questions.
The key question is: why does this matter? It matters because of the consolidation of wealth that’s occurred, especially in the last couple of decades, so that a small number of families control a huge percentage of the world’s resources. The families that own the complex family enterprises I teach about is that what happened in 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 I think the importance of calling it the Global Family Enterprise Program — 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 everybody around?
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 called and asked whether I wanted to do a global immersion course. I immediately chose the Nordic region to open the opportunity for students to study stakeholdership, sustainability, innovation and, of course family enterprise in a region that excels in these areas.
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 a excellent laboratory to see it in action. The Nordic Industrial Foundation, combines non-profit 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 thing about the class was really to be 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 owners and the family behind it — some of them are owners, some are not. But very often, when I ask in the first class why they’ve come, they say it’s because these countries are at the top of the happiness scales, 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?
After we had spent enough time building out the foundation in the classroom, and having a formal program with some administrative support, it was time to meet some other needs that were out there. That led to the first exec ed offering, which was in person, called Enterprising Families.
The emphasis is different when you have a family owner in the room versus an advisor in the room, so we were able to offer similar content to both, but tailor it — which is important.
The success of the online offering (Family Enterprises and Wealth: Online) has been a surprise to me. It brings our offerings 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 with the people who have been drawn to working in the Global Family Enterprise Program — they have combined head and heart – and our growth reflect the collective effort of so many people. We differentiated the school by first focusing on MBA students, which was a gap in the field, and proactively engaging alumni.
I’ve really enjoyed getting to know students in the classroom, having one-on-one relationships with them, and then retaining some of those relationships over time as alumni. From the beginning, I wanted to make sure this wasn’t just: they take a class and they’re gone.
I’d say it was especially important during Covid — that was a challenging time for everybody, including the switch to online classes at CBS. 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 before.
And the advisory board — I really felt well supported by alumni and others who were committed to education in this area in a more profound way than existed 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 surprised me has been how hard it is for people to see what’s right in front of them: increasingly large percentages of the world’s economy in a small numbers of families. The businesses, investments, assets, and charitable organizations they own and control. Impact us all, everyday. It still surprises me that the perception of family ownership is that it’s unprofessional and small, but the reality is that it ranges from very small to very large, and it’s complex — and deserves the kind of attention that we at CBS have been giving it.