Leadership Spotlight

Every family business faces unique challenges of succession and leadership, but what happens when a family business is actually a multinational corporation worth billions? The Wharton Global Family Alliance (Wharton GFA), a research partnership between Wharton and leading global business families, aims to address the key questions major family firms face. In March 2005, the alliance held its first conference in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE), to bring together Wharton researchers and more than 300 family business leaders from around the world.

The three-day Dubai conference created a forum for discussing economic trends affecting its members, with a particular emphasis on issues specific to the Middle East. Wharton professors Ian McMillan, Richard Herring, Bulent Gultekin, Janice Bellace, and Raphael (Raffi) Amit moderated panels on such topics as "Capital Markets and Investment Opportunities," "Creating Societal Wealth," "Entrepreneurship and Capital Flows," "Valuing Private Companies" and "Managing Family Succession." Keynote speakers included H.E. Dr. Mohamed Khalfan bin Khirbash, UAE Minister of State for Finance and Industry, and Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem, executive chairman of Dubai's Ports, Customs & Free Zone Corp.; chairman of Tejari.com, a B2B marketplace; chairman of the property development company Nakheel; and executive chairman of Istithmar, a Dubai- based investment holding company that was the lead sponsor of the conference.

"The conference demonstrated the power of combining Wharton's research capabilities with a deep network of family business leaders," said Wharton GFA Executive Director Todd Millay.

Thirty-five percent of the S&P 500 is family controlled, and 15% of the world's largest 1,000 businesses is family owned. Worldwide, more than half of the private sector works for family firms. WGFA is a first-of-its-kind collaboration between Wharton and CCC Alliance that allows global families with businesses at the highest levels to collaborate for their mutual benefit and for the betterment of society as a whole. Led by Wharton management professor Raffi Amit, the chairman of the Wharton GFA Executive Committee, WGFA is focused on research into, and the sharing of, best practices of globally influential family enterprises.

Recent Wharton GFA research includes a major study on the added value derived from family firms run by founders and a case study on Kohler, the closely held family-run plumbing fixtures firm with annual revenues in excess of $2 billion.