Family Enterprise Insights

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?

Are We Protecting the Business, or Protecting It From Growth?A new study of 247 Swiss family firms, published this year in the Journal of the International Council for Small Business, offers a sharp finding: as family ownership grows more concentrated, financial goals tend to grow more conservative. That's not always a failure of ambition. Often it's a family protecting things a balance sheet can't measure, independence, identity, control. But the researchers found ambitious goals were the strongest predictor of stronger performance, which raises the real question: is your caution a deliberate choice, or has it simply become the default? This month's entertainment feature picks up the same tension, three generations deep.

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.

A World Cup final compresses years of effort into seconds. A 250th anniversary stretches decades into centuries. Family enterprises operate within both registers of time, required to act decisively in moments of consequence while remaining accountable to decisions whose effects unfold across generations. Major anniversaries surface this tension directly, prompting not merely a reckoning with what an enterprise has survived, but a deliberate choice about which version of its founder, and of itself, it will continue to remember. Drawing on Paul Morrow's centennial research, a study by Börje Boers and Andrea Calabrò, and the Hénokiens, this piece considers what history is ultimately for.

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.

This month we mark National Family Owned and Operated Businesses Day, and the phrase rewards a second look. We celebrate the business, and rightly so. The business may be the source of wealth, the center of identity, the training ground for leadership, and the shared project that connects generations. Behind many of these enterprises are remarkable stories: founders and families who began with almost nothing and built something lasting through years of work, risk, and sacrifice.But the wealth a business creates does not stay inside it. Over time it takes other forms: liquidity, portfolios, real estate, trusts, foundations, direct investments, philanthropy, and new ventures. It also includes wealth that never appears on a balance sheet at all: a family's knowledge, judgment, relationships, reputation, and capacity to make decisions together. The organization a family builds to hold all of that is the family office.It is usually described as a structure for managing wealth. True, but incomplete. A systematic review published this year helps widen the frame. Reviewing 60 peer-reviewed studies published between 1980 and 2024, Siaba, Rivera, and Currais argue that the family office is better understood not only as a service platform but as a governance structure that mediates among the family, the business, and the wealth.

Last week, we proudly watched the Class of 2026 graduate, and it feels like it is the right moment to ask a question that sits at the heart of both career development and family enterprise continuity: where can talent truly grow?

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.

As Columbia Business School deepens its institutional commitment to AI through its AI in Business Initiative and the upcoming "MBA Transformed: AI and Beyond" teaching symposium on June 1, 2026, family enterprises face a parallel question: is AI a threat to legacy, or a new way to coauthor it? A recent study in the Journal of Product Innovation Management, "AI Adoption in Family Firms: A Mixed-Methods Study on the Paradoxical Roles of Passive and Active Family Involvement," suggests AI adoption is as much a relationship and governance challenge as a technological one. Drawing on 125 interviews and survey data from 1,444 German firms, the authors find that passive family ownership may slow adoption, while active family management can accelerate it, particularly when paired with strong external ties to suppliers, customers, and even competitors. For enterprising families, the deeper insight is that legacy is not static; it is interpreted and renewed across generations. AI may become a voice of the next generation, offering younger family members a concrete way to contribute to continuity, if families are willing to turn legacy into a living conversation. Read the full article, Is AI a Threat to Legacy, or a New Way to Coauthor It?

A Reflection on the 2026 CBS Family Enterprise Conference: Legacying TogetherFriday, April 17thColumbia Business School