This July gave us two very different ways to experience time.
In the final minutes of the World Cup, seconds seemed to last forever. Years of training, sacrifice, strategy, and disappointment were compressed into a few decisive moments. One touch, one save, or one hesitation could reshape the meaning of everything that came before. Eventually, someone lifted a trophy, while everyone else began explaining what went wrong.
The 250th anniversary of American independence asks us to think about time differently. Instead of compressing years into seconds, it stretches our perspective across centuries. It invites us to make sense not only of accomplishments, but also of contradictions, setbacks, recoveries, and periods when progress was difficult to recognize.
Family enterprises live between these two clocks. They must respond to moments when timing is critical, while making choices whose consequences may unfold across generations. A successful season ends with a score. A multigenerational enterprise must keep interpreting what its history asks of the present.
Major anniversaries bring these different experiences of time together. They invite celebration, but they also create a moment of judgment.
At 25 years, someone remembers the founder.
At 100 years, the organization remembers the founder.
At 250 years, the family must decide which version of the founder, and of itself, it will continue to remember.
An anniversary, then, is not simply a birthday. It is a moment when time becomes a strategic resource.
What anniversaries allow us to see
Paul Morrow's research on centennials helps explain why major anniversaries carry such power. He argues that centennials serve three important social functions. They act as standards of greatness, mirrors of progress, and spurs to renovation.
First, time creates distance. Once the founders, their allies, and their rivals are gone, an institution can be evaluated beyond the loyalties and conflicts of its original moment. Survival begins to look like evidence of significance.
Second, anniversaries create a mirror. They invite comparison between what an organization once was and what it has become. This comparison is rarely a simple story of uninterrupted progress. It also helps people interpret the highs and lows, the decisions that opened new possibilities, the mistakes that carried lasting consequences, and the periods when merely enduring required substantial adaptation.
Third, anniversaries can prompt renovation. Looking backward can create permission, and sometimes an obligation, to ask what the future now requires. The past becomes not only something to preserve, but also a resource for change.
A recent study by Börje Boers and Andrea Calabrò extends this conversation directly into family enterprise. The researchers studied family firms in Germany and Sweden that had endured for more than 100 years. They found that these firms developed what they call hybrid identities, shaped by three types of reference points: their history, the owning family, and the industry in which they operate.
Historical references connect the enterprise to its origins, turning points, and accumulated experience. Family references include names, values, relationships, ownership commitments, and succession stories. Industry references connect the firm to its expertise, reputation, products, customers, and place within a particular field.
Together, these elements help answer two essential questions: Who are we, and who are we not?
That distinction can create agility. A family that understands what is truly central to its identity can respond more quickly when markets, technologies, or social expectations change. It does not need to preserve every inherited practice in order to remain recognizable. It can distinguish enduring commitments from habits that simply happen to be old.
But age alone does not produce this clarity.
A company does not become more self-aware merely by surviving for another decade. In fact, a longer history can produce more myths, more competing interpretations, and more practices protected by the phrase, "This is how we have always done it."
Turning history into useful self-knowledge requires intentional work. Families must decide what to remember, what to question, what to retain, and what to update in their understanding of who they are. Without that work, history can become accumulated baggage. With it, history can become a source of strategic clarity.
Turning attention into anniversary capital
The concept of "anniversary capital" offers another way to understand what becomes possible during a major milestone.
Anniversaries concentrate attention, emotion, visibility, and legitimacy. They give families and organizations a socially accepted reason to tell stories, convene stakeholders, revisit decisions, and make claims about the future.
That attention can produce several forms of value.
Symbolic attention can reinforce legitimacy and stewardship. Social energy can reconnect family branches, employees, customers, and communities. Archival work can become knowledge that helps educate future owners. Public visibility can support commercial opportunities, heritage branding, philanthropy, or new partnerships.
But the conversion is not automatic.
A gala can generate photographs without generating capability.
A history book can preserve a story without preparing an owner.
A family gathering can create warmth without improving governance.
An anniversary campaign can celebrate resilience without examining what that resilience required, who carried its costs, or whose contribution disappeared from the official account.
Anniversary capital becomes durable only when the family converts attention into learning, relationships, governance, or renewal.
That may involve revisiting ownership purpose, strengthening decision processes, preparing for a leadership transition, investing in next-generation development, or reconsidering parts of the business portfolio. It may also involve a more difficult task: deciding which aspects of the inherited identity should continue to guide the enterprise, and which should be revised so that the organization can remain relevant.
A longer history, and a faster world
The Hénokiens offer a compelling illustration. Their association brings together family enterprises that are at least 200 years old and remain majority-owned and managed by descendants of their founders. Their histories include wars, revolutions, technological disruption, market collapse, regulatory change, and repeated succession.
Studies about these families organize their longevity around four recurring dimensions: family assets, roadblocks, succession, and innovation. Family assets include names, reputations, networks, values, traditions, and accumulated knowledge. Yet these assets support continuity only when families also confront obstacles, plan transitions, and repeatedly reinvent the enterprise.
Their longevity does not come from preserving the original business unchanged. It comes from knowing what must remain recognizable and what must be allowed to change.
This connection is particularly meaningful for our community. One of the newest additions to our faculty, Marc de Kuyper, comes from the 11th generation of De Kuyper Royal Distillers, a family enterprise whose history spans more than three centuries. De Kuyper appears in the Hénokiens research through questions of quality, reputation, succession, and renewal.
Marc also brings this long view into his thinking about artificial intelligence, a field in which timing is often of the essence. New technologies reward speed, experimentation, and the ability to act before every uncertainty has disappeared.
At first, centuries of history and the speed of AI may appear to pull in opposite directions. Yet a long history can support faster adaptation when it gives an enterprise a clearer understanding of its identity. The more clearly a family knows what it stands for, what it does distinctively well, and what it is not trying to preserve, the more freedom it may have to experiment.
History then becomes a compass rather than baggage.
Again, this outcome is not guaranteed by age. It requires deliberate interpretation. Each generation must choose which elements of identity remain essential, which need new expression, and which should no longer determine the future.
An anniversary tells us that something has endured. It does not tell us why it endured, whether it should continue in the same form, or what obligations its history places on the present generation.
The most valuable anniversaries may therefore be those that do more than celebrate survival. They help families examine what time has strengthened, what it has distorted, and what must change if continuity is to remain a choice rather than a habit.
Time may give a family enterprise a history. An anniversary gives the family a moment to decide what that history will be used for.
Questions for reflection
- Which periods of your family enterprise's history are celebrated most often, and which highs, lows, or contradictions receive less attention?
- Which parts of your identity provide clarity about who you are, and which inherited practices have become accumulated baggage?
- Who currently has the authority to interpret the family's history, and whose perspective may be missing?
- What attention or emotional energy could an upcoming anniversary generate, and how could the family convert it into lasting capability?
- What should the next generation be expected to preserve, and what should it be free to reinterpret?
The World Cup showed how a few seconds can define a legacy. The 250th anniversary asks how a legacy, built across centuries, should shape the choices still ahead. For enterprising families, the work is to turn legacy into direction, not destiny.