GFEP 10-Year Anniversary

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 Managing the Growing Company, 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