Late August is traditionally a moment when much of the business world begins looking toward the year ahead. This year, that reflection is happening on a much larger stage. In the final days of August and the opening days of September, central bankers and economic policymakers will gather first at the Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium and then at the G20 finance meetings in Asheville, North Carolina.
They will be making decisions in an environment shaped by trade tensions, geopolitical instability, changing financial conditions, and rapid technological change. The World Economic Forum identifies geoeconomic confrontation as the leading global risk for 2026, and half of the leaders and experts it surveyed expect the near-term global outlook to be turbulent or stormy. The IMF continues to point to unusually high geopolitical and policy uncertainty.
Jackson Hole will also mark Kevin Warsh's first address there as Federal Reserve chair, just weeks before the Fed's next interest rate decision on September 16. Warsh himself, asked about the speech at his July 29 press conference, said Jackson Hole has historically served as "sort of a setting-up speech... of what was going to be happening in the fall," though he added he hadn't yet decided whether this year's remarks would be big-picture or a more traditional preview of the fall policy calendar.
So the question hanging over these meetings is not abstract: how long can leaders wait for clarity before waiting becomes a decision in itself?
Their challenge will sound familiar to many family owners. How much do you protect? How much do you invest? And how do you make long-term decisions when waiting for clarity may mean waiting indefinitely?
For years, leaders were taught to navigate a VUCA world, one characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. More recently, another framework has emerged that may better capture what many leaders are experiencing: BANI.
BANI stands for brittle, anxious, nonlinear, and incomprehensible.
The distinction matters.
Volatility tells us that conditions change quickly. Brittleness reminds us that systems that appear strong can suddenly break. Uncertainty makes forecasting difficult. Anxiety changes how people behave when they cannot predict what comes next. Complexity suggests many interacting variables. Nonlinearity means that a seemingly small event can have an enormous consequence, while a major intervention may accomplish surprisingly little. Ambiguity leaves room for different interpretations. Incomprehensibility goes further: sometimes even after something happens, we struggle to understand why.
For family enterprises, this kind of environment can make prudence especially attractive.
Preserve cash. Avoid unnecessary debt. Protect control. Be careful about outside capital. Delay large investments until there is greater clarity.
Those instincts can be a source of resilience. Many family enterprises have survived difficult periods precisely because previous generations resisted pressures to overextend themselves.
But that strength raises a more uncomfortable question:
What happens when prudence stops protecting the enterprise and starts limiting what it can become?
What happens to ambition when the family owns more?
A new study by Kilian Klösel and Jürgen Fritz, published this year in the Journal of the International Council for Small Business, offers an intriguing piece of evidence.
The researchers surveyed 247 entrepreneurs and senior executives from Swiss family firms across 23 industries. They examined three things: how much of the company the family owned, how ambitious the company's financial goals were, and how the business was performing.
Their definition of financial ambition was broader than simply "make more money." They looked at goals related to market share, return on assets, and the firm's ability to finance itself. Performance reflected recent sales trends and expectations about future sales.
Most of the companies were small and mid-sized businesses. Roughly two-thirds employed fewer than 50 people. In other words, these were not simply the large family-controlled companies that attract headlines. They looked much more like the businesses that make up the everyday fabric of family enterprise around the world.
A quick note on the evidence before we share it: it is fair to keep in mind that this comes from a single survey moment rather than firms tracked over time, with owners reporting on both their own goals and their own performance. It is equally fair to note that the pattern itself is consistent, drawn from 247 family businesses across 23 industries, and holds up well enough to be worth sitting with. Take it, then, as an invitation to examine your own assumptions and spark conversation within your owners' group, rather than a verdict to accept outright.
The researchers found three important patterns.
1. As family ownership increased, financial goals tended to become more conservative.
That does not necessarily mean family owners were less ambitious.
Their ambitions may simply have included things that financial measures do not capture: remaining independent, preserving control, maintaining liquidity, protecting the family's wealth, or keeping the enterprise strong enough to pass on.
Those are legitimate objectives.
But they can influence how aggressively a company chooses to grow. An opportunity that requires substantial borrowing may look less attractive if independence is a central family value. Bringing in outside capital may make financial sense while feeling too costly in terms of control. Reinvesting heavily may support growth but conflict with shareholders' expectations for distributions.
Over time, these trade-offs can affect not only which opportunities a family pursues, but also the goals it sets in the first place.
The important distinction is between choosing a more conservative definition of success intentionally and gradually lowering aspirations because certain paths to growth have become unacceptable.
2. Firms with more ambitious financial goals tended to report stronger performance.
This was the strongest relationship the researchers observed. Why might goals matter so much?
A clear financial goal does more than put a number on a spreadsheet. It focuses attention.
If increasing market share matters, management thinks differently about investment, talent, capacity, acquisitions, and new markets. If return on assets is a priority, capital allocation receives different scrutiny. If the goal is to strengthen the company's ability to finance future growth, today's decisions about profits, distributions, and investment look different.
Goals help determine what receives resources and what does not. They influence which opportunities deserve attention and which distractions can wait.
That may become particularly valuable in a BANI environment. When leaders cannot control or even fully interpret what is happening outside the company, a clear internal sense of what the organization is trying to accomplish can provide an anchor.
The external world may remain unclear. The enterprise's ambitions do not have to be.
3. Higher family ownership was also associated with somewhat lower reported performance.
This does not mean that family ownership is the problem.
The more interesting possibility raised by the study is that ownership may influence performance partly through the goals owners are willing to set.
The researchers themselves are careful to call this a plausible pathway rather than a proven one: their analysis shows these three factors moving together, not that one causes the next in sequence. That distinction matters for how you use this finding. It is an invitation to examine whether your own priorities around control and continuity are quietly shaping the goals you set, not a formula that guarantees stronger performance if the numbers simply get bigger.
If greater family control makes preserving independence, continuity, and flexibility more important, those priorities may influence the level of financial ambition the family considers appropriate. Those goals then influence where management directs attention, capital, and energy.
The strategic question therefore changes. Instead of asking, "Should the family own less?" perhaps owners should ask: "What is our desire to protect control, continuity, and independence doing to the ambitions we set for the enterprise?" That is a much more useful ownership conversation.
What are we really protecting?
The researchers use a concept called socioemotional wealth, often shortened to SEW, to help explain what may be happening. The terminology sounds academic. The idea is very familiar. Family owners rarely evaluate their enterprise only in dollars and cents. The company may carry the family name. It may embody decades of sacrifice. It may provide opportunities for family members and employment for a community. It may represent independence, reputation, identity, belonging, and something meaningful to pass to another generation. Control itself can have value. So can being able to say, "This is still ours." None of those things appear on a balance sheet, but that does not make them less valuable.
And when something is valuable, we naturally try to protect it.
That helps explain why decisions that appear financially conservative from the outside can make perfect sense to an owning family. Avoiding outside investors may preserve control. Keeping debt low may protect independence. Maintaining liquidity may allow the family to think across generations rather than quarters.
The interesting question is what happens next.
The authors suggest that financial goals may be one of the places where these ownership preferences become translated into business behavior. What the family wants to protect can influence the goals it considers acceptable. Those goals, in turn, help shape where management focuses attention, where capital goes, and which opportunities the company is willing to pursue.
That shifts the conversation. The issue is no longer simply, "Should the family retain control?" A potentially more useful question is: "What is our desire to retain control doing to our level of ambition?"
Because protecting what matters can gradually change what we believe is possible. And that shift can happen quietly, goal by goal, without anyone ever deciding to lower the bar.
Prudence is a strength. Unexamined prudence may not be.
Imagine a profitable third-generation company facing an opportunity to enter a new market. The investment would require significant capital. The family could borrow, bring in an outside investor, or reinvest a much larger share of earnings. Instead, the owners decide to wait. Debt feels dangerous. Outside equity could compromise control. Lower distributions would affect family shareholders. The current business is profitable. And the family has survived previous downturns precisely because it has always been conservative.
Every argument makes sense. A year later, another opportunity appears. Again, they wait. No owners meeting ever produces the decision, "We no longer want this company to grow."
Instead, a sequence of perfectly defensible decisions gradually defines what the company will and will not become. That is where this research becomes especially relevant. The question is not whether conservative financial management is good or bad. Nor does the study suggest that family businesses should borrow more, dilute ownership, or pursue growth at all costs.
The more useful question is whether families periodically examine the assumptions hidden inside their prudence. "We don't want debt" can be a thoughtful financial policy. It can also become part of the family's identity. "We finance growth ourselves" can protect independence. It can also restrict the opportunities the company is capable of pursuing. "We don't need to grow that much" can be an intentional ownership decision. A family has every right to decide that maximizing financial growth is not its objective.
But the same sentence can mean something very different if it emerges only after the owners have eliminated every option that requires more risk, outside expertise, less liquidity, or some reduction in control.
The difference is intentionality. Have we consciously decided what we want? Or have our fears gradually decided it for us?
Why BANI makes this harder
This is where the BANI environment matters.
When the world feels brittle, protecting what already exists becomes more attractive.
When people feel anxious, avoiding risk feels more attractive.
When outcomes are nonlinear, familiar models become less dependable.
When events feel incomprehensible, waiting for greater clarity feels reasonable.
Yet the same environment may require exactly the opposite capabilities: experimentation, investment, new expertise, faster adaptation, and the willingness to act before every variable can be known.
This creates a difficult tension for family owners.
The qualities that helped protect the enterprise yesterday can become the qualities that prevent it from adapting tomorrow.
The danger, therefore, may not be prudence itself.
It is allowing prudence to determine ambition without ever having a conversation about ambition.
Perhaps one of the responsibilities of ownership is not simply to protect the enterprise from excessive risk. It is also to protect the enterprise from becoming constrained by the family's own definition of safety.
Questions for reflection
- Which of our financial policies are deliberate strategic choices, and which have become assumptions that we rarely reconsider?
- When we say an investment is "too risky," what exactly are we protecting: the enterprise, family wealth, distributions, control, identity, or simply our comfort with uncertainty?
- Have we intentionally chosen our financial goals, or have we gradually adjusted our ambitions to fit the risks we are willing to take?
- Who in our governance system has permission to challenge the family's definition of prudence?
- If we temporarily removed "protect what we have" from the conversation, what might we want this enterprise to become?
In a BANI world, resilience certainly requires protecting what matters. But resilience also requires preserving the capacity to move. The Klösel and Fritz study invites family owners to look beyond how much of the enterprise they own and examine something more subtle: what ownership may be doing to the goals they set for it.
The challenge is not to become less prudent. It is to make sure prudence remains a choice rather than a ceiling.