For nearly 40 years, the Global Family Business Center at IMD Business School in Switzerland has advised some of the world’s most complex enterprising families—from rising entrepreneurs to dynasties with more than 1,500 family members. In this conversation with Canadian Family Offices, Peter Vogel, professor of family business and entrepreneurship at the IMD and director of the Global Family Business Center, discusses the hidden pressures facing next-generation wealth owners, why family business education requires far more than an MBA, and how issues like privacy and identity are reshaping life for wealthy families.
Tell us a bit about your background.
I’m a professor of family business and entrepreneurship, and I run the IMD Global Family Business Center, which I joined nine years ago. I have a family business background, though I’ve been more on the entrepreneurial side, creating ventures and investing in startups. I’ve always had a foot in the door of academia as well as the world of startups and investing.
When did the IMD Global Family Business Center start?
The IMD Global Family Business Center is one of the oldest centres devoted to family business education in the world, with close to 40 years of history. Back in 1988, Alden Lank, John Davis, John Ward and Ivan Landsberg created the first program for enterprising families at IMD, named Leading your Family Business [LFB].
These families are dealing with topics their peers in an MBA/EMBA program won’t typically experience.
Peter Vogel
There’s also a Canadian connection: Frank Tilley, former owner and CEO of the Canadian Tilley luxury leather goods company, worked with IMD professor Alden Lank to create the first executive-in-residence at IMD, setting the foundation for LFB. From there, LFB alumni and others teamed up to create the Family Business Network [a global not-for-profit connecting family-owned businesses], which keeps strong ties to IMD. Both organizations collaborate on numerous research, educational and advocacy initiatives.
How many faculty do you have?
The Global Family Business Center is very intertwined with IMD, so it’s difficult to draw an exact line. We have three core family business professors, including myself. Overall, IMD has 60 faculty members, and 10 to 15 of them have regular family business touch points within the different programs on boards, leadership development, strategy or finance.
Why was the Global Family Business Center started?
Members of enterprising families can, of course, participate in classical leadership or strategy programs, do an MBA or EMBA. These are important educational pillars, which help them learn the nuts and bolts of running a business.
That said, these families are dealing with topics their peers in an MBA/EMBA program won’t typically experience. Things like ‘Should I join our family business?’ ‘Am I the right person for this role?’ ‘How do I deal with my siblings, parents or cousins?’ ‘Should we keep the company at all?’ and ‘What is my greater purpose in life and how do I translate my wealth into responsible ownership?’
They rarely have a peer group to discuss this with, so there’s a huge need for bespoke programs for enterprising families. It doesn’t replace the classical education—it sits on top of it.
What sets IMD Global Family Business Center’s programs apart?
Our classic open programs are the Leading Your Family Business program, which we’ve run for almost 40 years, and Leading Your Family Office, for more than 20 years. These programs are exclusive to members of enterprising families. They can bring along one or two board members or non-family executives, but we have no advisors and no executives without the family.
We’re there for the big decisions in business units and management, as well as organizational and governance transitions.
Peter Vogel
An important design feature of our programs is to ensure a safe space for learning among family members. The topics the families discuss are delicate in nature—whether it’s family and ownership concerns, or business and wealth-related topics—so a highly curated and protected learning environment is essential.
Tell me about IMD’s custom programs.
Probably 90 per cent of my time is spent on customized work with families who choose to continue their journey with us after an open program or who hear about us through their peers. Some of our work is with complex dynastic families; the largest has over 1,500 family members. For them, we are kind of the family university. We do the next-gen education with various age groups, starting with young children, and work with the senior generation of the family, too. We’ll also run ownership readiness programs, career development and board preparation, as well as more advisory-type work.
We also engage in transformation journeys with family enterprises by closely working with the owners, the board and the management team. This involves thinking through the ownership strategy, which cascades into the corporate strategy. And we’re there for the big decisions in the business units and management, as well as organizational and governance transformations. I enjoy these a lot, as they are very intense (in some cases 30 to 40 days of engagement per calendar year), but very rewarding and impactful mandates.
We also have many stand-alone initiatives, where families ask us to attend a family meeting to help revise a shareholder agreement or a family constitution and to offer workshops for family members.
And finally, we run a series of partnership programs with banks, professional services firms or network organizations who ask us to do a program for their members or clients. We’re also very proud of our Global Family Business Award, which turns 30 this year. Through that, we have developed relationships with many remarkable families.
Do you do research?
The IMD Global Family Business Center is one of the most published centres in the world when it comes to FT50 articles. Besides the traditional academic publications, we focus a lot of energy on highly relevant practitioner articles, case studies, books, toolkits and frameworks. For example, I started a series of ‘Navigators’ a couple of years ago, namely the Family Philanthropy Navigator and the Family Office Navigator. There will be more to follow.
We also run a global family office study. Last December, we published the IMD-FBN Global Family Office Report, which is freely available for download. The study investigates family office identities and how they change shape and form over time, adjusting to the needs of the family.
And we have a joint research project focused on mental health and enterprising families. It’s a multi-year partnership between IMD, the Telfer School of Management in Ottawa, [Family Enterprise Legacy Institute director] Prof. Peter Jaskiewicz and Telfer researcher Elizabeth Tetzlaff.
What issues are today’s enterprising families dealing with?
First, there are more liquidity events than in the past, which means more capital in the system and more families wondering, ‘What do we do next?’ At the same time, families are becoming more complex and geographically dispersed. They’re operating across multiple jurisdictions, each with unique and constantly evolving legal and tax frameworks.
There’s also a lot of societal pressure on the wealthy and debates about taxation at a time of radically increased visibility. Type any wealthy family’s name into a search engine and the auto-complete will tell you their net worth. Families are super-exposed and security is a concern—not just physical, but reputational. They’re thinking about digital literacy, social media presence and even how visible they do or don’t want their philanthropy to be.
Families are also asking whether their mid-sized businesses can stay competitive amid volatile global markets and in times of AI and disruption. I think those are realities that more and more families are confronted with, and these are existential questions they are asking.
Cindy McGlynn is a Toronto-based writer and editor who frequently writes about business, culture and the arts. In addition to holding communications roles at tech startups and writing for consumer and B2B publications, Cindy has edited two national magazines and served as a long-time columnist for the Toronto Star’s Eye Weekly magazine. She has been contributing to Canadian Family Offices for four years.
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