Family Enterprise Insights

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.

As part of the Global Family Enterprise Program’s 10th anniversary, we’re running an "Alumni Spotlight" series celebrating the people who helped build the Family Enterprise community at CBS over the past decade. Christopher Poon ‘14 was a natural place to start: as  the Family Business Club’s president, he took a small, informal group of ten or fifteen students and turned it into the foundation of the club over 300 members now call home. It was Poon who launched the “Family Business Matters” event that carries on today; opening up about his own family with a level of vulnerability that, by his own account, “went quite viral in the school” and changed what the club could be.Poon was interviewed by Tricia Philip-Rao, Senior Director of the Global Family Enterprise Program, and Nick Kim, 2026–2027 Co-President of the Family Business Club, connecting an early club leader with one of its current ones.Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

The Global Family Enterprise Program’s first faculty director looks back on its origins, an early decision to focus on the MBA experience, and what today's students can take from those who came before them.When Columbia Business School formalized what is now the Global Family Enterprise Program in 2016, it was building on work already under way: courses taught by Patricia Angus and Michael Preston, and a student-run Family Business Club that was growing fast. What the School added was structure, a curriculum centered on MBA students, and the ambition to become a center for research on family enterprise.Daniel Wolfenzon, Nomura Professor of International Finance and the Program’s first faculty director, helped lead that effort. As the Program marks its 10th anniversary, he took time to reflect on its origins and his experience.Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

As the Global Family Enterprise Program marks its 10th anniversary, co-founder Michael Preston reflects on the decades of work that came before it, and on where the field is headed.Long before Columbia Business School had a Global Family Enterprise Program, and before it offered a single course on the subject, Michael Preston was teaching students to look past the business to the family behind it.Ten years on, the Program has grown to include a dedicated curriculum, experiential learning, an advisory board, and an alumni community around the world. We sat down with Michael, one of the Program's co-founders, to hear how it all came together, from his early career to the Program's founding and his view of the field today.Quotes have been edited for length and clarity.As Michael tells it, there was no single founding moment. “Some of it is luck, and some of it is reactions to things that I didn’t like, and wanting to make things better,” he said. “You have a combination, over a long period of time, of a lot of events that came to, I think, a very positive conclusion.”

Patricia Angus first came to Columbia Business School as a guest speaker in Michael Preston's Family Business Management course, invited to talk about estate planning. The students' response was so strong that she soon launched Family Enterprise & Wealth, the second dedicated course in what would become the Global Family Enterprise Program.As the Program marks its 10th anniversary, Patricia, one of its co-founders, sat down with Senior Director Tricia Philip-Rao to reflect on its origins, her experience building it, and what has surprised her along the way, from renaming the Program to taking students to the Nordics.Responses have been edited for length and clarity

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.

What a landmark genetics study can teach enterprising families about nature, nurture, and the stories they tell about each other.A new Nature study of over a million people found that common genetic variants account for roughly 5 to 9 percent of the differences in personality traits like openness and conscientiousness. For enterprising families, where personality often shapes who gets trusted with leadership and ownership, the finding offers a more precise, if modest, piece of the nature versus nurture picture. It does not tell a family who should lead. It does suggest that the labels families use for one another, "the responsible one," "the entrepreneur," "not leadership material," deserve more scrutiny than they usually get.

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.