Family Business News

As the Global Family Enterprise Program celebrates its tenth year, five of the world’s best-known family enterprises are reaching milestones of their own. From a Parma pasta shop to a Florence shoemaker, their stories show how a single founding idea can grow into a legacy carried across generations.

Tucked between 86th and 87th on Amsterdam Avenue, Barney Greengrass is a classic Upper West Side deli counter known for its smoked fish, fresh bagels, and pickled specialties. It's also a family business that's stayed in the same family for four generations, since 1908.

They All Came to Barneys: Personal History of the World's Greatest Store, a recently released memoir by Gene Pressman, traces three generations of his family's ownership of the retailer his grandfather Barney founded in 1923. It's a story of ambition, expansion, and legacy: how far a family will go to build something extraordinary, and what happens when that growth eventually outpaces what it was meant to protect. Three things worth carrying into the read: ambition compounds quietly across generations, expansion rarely feels reckless in the moment it's decided, and a family enterprise carries weight no balance sheet can capture. The question worth asking: at what point does the ambition that builds a company become the risk that ends it?

Brittany Shyne's Seeds, winner of the Sundance Grand Jury Prize and a 2026 Academy Award shortlistee, offers an intimate look at centennial Black farming families in the American South. It is a story of land, inheritance, and the quiet work of deciding what gets passed down, and what gets lost along the way.

Netflix's Dynasty: The Murdochs offers a rare look inside one of the world's most scrutinized family enterprises, and a documentary that the series Succession was reportedly inspired by. The film traces the succession tensions, internal family dynamics, and governance challenges that have defined one of media's most powerful dynasties. It is candid, compelling, and at times uncomfortable in the way that only real family stories can be. This month we are particularly proud to note that Global Family Enterprise Program co-founder Patricia Angus appears in the final episode as a Family Trust Consultant, bringing her expertise directly into the conversation.

John Seabrook's The Spinach King, a New York Times Notable Book of 2025 and New Yorker Best Book of the Year, traces four generations of his own family's frozen-vegetable empire. It is a story of succession, sibling dynamics, and legacy, told with humor, honesty, and the warmth of a reporter coming home.

Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost invites viewers into the creative and personal world of comedians Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, the parents of filmmaker Ben Stiller. Directed by their son, the documentary traces their careers, partnership, and influence through archival material and reflection, exploring how legacy is shaped not only by professional success but also by family relationships, memory, and generational continuity. It is an intimate look at how stories, values, and identity are carried forward across generations.  

The Merchants of Joy invites viewers into the world of the five family enterprises that bring New York its Christmas trees each year. The documentary reveals how these families balance legacy, logistics, and leadership in a business that appears simple from the sidewalk but is far more intricate behind the scenes. It is an intimate look at the family decision-making that shapes one of the city’s most beloved holiday traditions.  

As families think more intentionally about the systems and behaviors that shape long-term resilience, the WeWork story offers a striking contemporary case study. This Family Enterprise Entertainment feature explores how decision-making, governance, and risk played out inside one of the fastest-scaling modern enterprises. Through the Apple TV+ series WeCrashed, starring Anne Hathaway and Jared Leto, and Hulu’s documentary WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn, we look at how a couple’s shared vision and leadership style influenced culture, accelerated growth, and exposed the organization to avoidable vulnerabilities. Together, these works highlight how the structures around leadership — or the lack of them — can determine whether an ambitious enterprise thrives or unravels. Click to read the full piece.  

TRON: Ares propels ENCOM and the Dillinger family into a new era where legacy and artificial intelligence collide. Through cutting-edge visuals and philosophical depth, the film explores how family enterprises navigate succession, innovation, and ethics in a rapidly changing technological world.