Consulting

This piece closes the loop on a year of Family Enterprise Insights by naming the common thread beneath our 2025 research: trust as infrastructure.

Seven days, five Italian cities, six company visits, and more than a dozen engaging sessions—the “CAFE in Italy” Global Immersion course took 16 graduate students on a deep dive into the heart of Italian family enterprises. Led by Professor Gaia Marchisio, participants met with owners, next‐generation leaders, and seasoned advisors. Stops included Barilla, Petrolifera Italo Rumena (PIR), Ascoli Bottoni, Acetaia Giusti, Ferragamo, and Frescobaldi, as well as discussions with DeAgostini, Bocconi University, Association of Italian Family Businesses, and Fideuram Intesa Sanpaolo. Students gained behind‐the‐scenes insight on succession, brand evolution, governance, and family values. The result was a vivid illustration of how tradition and innovation can combine to keep family legacies thriving across centuries.

Advising enterprising families calls for more than just business savvy; it requires understanding trust, legacy, and emotion. While advisors are often skilled in governance and strategy, many overlook the “human architecture” that truly drives family enterprise success. Below, we explore how to bridge this critical gap.

Most articles or speeches about family businesses start with some version of the “three-generation rule,” which suggests that most don’t survive beyond three generations. 

The New Ideas in Family Firms Academic – Practitioner Conference, co-hosted online with Columbia’s Global Family Enterprise Program and INSEAD’s Wendel International Centre for Family Enterprise, took place on May 7, 2021. Leading academic researchers and global practitioners discussed the role of the family enterprise in society, the meaning and potential for ESG practices, and ways that the pandemic has impacted family enterprise advisory work

Written by adjunct professor and managing director Patricia Angus, who has more than 25 years’ experience working with families to create, administer, and benefit from trusts, the Beneficiary Primer is a “go to” resource for anyone who has been named as a beneficiary. 

ESG investing is here to stay.

In the high-stakes environment of a family enterprise, the "spillover effect" of negative emotions can do more than just disrupt board meetings—it can fundamentally alter the physiological and psychological health of family members. While decades of research have linked emotionally negative households to abnormal eating behaviors, the data has often been inconsistent. To resolve these discrepancies, Professor Michael Slepian and his colleagues examined the role of emotion contagion as a psychological filter. Their findings suggest that the risk of developing disordered eating is not a universal byproduct of a negative family climate, but rather a targeted vulnerability for those who are most "porous" to the emotions of their kin. By understanding this moderating link, family offices and enterprise leaders can better identify at-risk members and implement strategies to build emotional resilience within the family system.

This paper provides evidence on the impact of paid leave legislation on fathers’ leave-taking, as well as on the division of leave between mothers and fathers in dual-earner households.