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Roundtables

Cornell Family Business Roundtables

The Smith Family Business Initiative (SFBI) roundtables explore various topics relevant to family business. We invite a small number of members of family businesses, scholars, and practitioners to join us in discussing a variety of current issues. The SFBI Family Business Roundtables provide an intimate and engaging forum for business leaders, practitioners, and academics to share their experience while learning from one another. These intimate gatherings will feature a mix of business owners, thought leaders, and family business scholars exploring numerous angles on the selected topic for the day. Each day is highly interactive and informative. Students are encouraged to join in the roundtable sessions, and we welcome them to present specific topics at each roundtable.

For each Family Business Roundtable, the SFBI partners with a strategic partner to explore topics in depth. If you or your organization is interested in hosting or supporting a Family Business Roundtable, please contact Dann Van Der Vliet (dgv9@cornell.edu).

Previous Family Innovations Roundtable

  • Responsible Ownership and Family Engagement
  • Family Forward: The Family Office and the New Generation of Wealth Stewards

Previous Family Business Roundtables

  • Hospitality and Family Business Roundtable: An Exploration of Intrapreneurship
  • Good Governance and the Multi-Gen Family Office
  • Family Business Conflict: From the Inside and Out
    Creative tension can be the key to achieving a successful family business, allowing it to reach new heights. If allowed to become overly negative, it can become destructive, causing undue friction, deadlock and impasse. In this Roundtable, we will explore conflict management techniques designed to deal with inevitable differences of opinion to prevent such negative results
  • The Future of Family Business – Envisioning the Evolving Role of the University-Based Family Enterprise Center
    Family businesses are key to economies and communities worldwide and not fully reflected in management education and teaching. The roundtable will cover the importance and impact of teaching of management for family business. The gathering will feature a mix of business owners, thought leaders and family business scholars.
  • Women, Leadership and their Family’s Business