In-Person Program
Future Family Enterprise Program
MIT Sloan School of Management
Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
October 18-23, 2026
April 4-9, 2027
October 17-22, 2027
The Future Family Enterprise program for multigenerational families helps participants implement the important driving factors of enduring, family enterprise success. It leads multigenerational families through a stimulating week-long conversation that produces clarity on the path ahead for each participating family and its enterprise. Your family will learn practical concepts and tested practices—organized around examples of multigenerational success and failure—to aid your thinking, improve your long-term planning and alignment, and shape the roadmap of your family enterprise system.
The six-day course explores where family enterprises are going and how they are being shaped by various trends and disruptions that are likely to impact their operating companies, wealth, family offices, governance, ownership strategy, and talent. It provides strategic thinking and planning sessions about what will drive their success in the future economy. MIT faculty explore the opportunities, challenges, and future trends for owning, governing, and managing a family company and a broader family enterprise organization over multiple generations.
The program leads families through a stimulating team experience with interactive classroom work and exchanges among families from around the world. In addition, your family will have daily, private, facilitated family meetings with a coach to focus on your interests and agenda. You will actively work together to build a roadmap for your family enterprise, leaving the program with a tailored plan to keep your family and enterprise on the path of long-term success.
PROGRAM VIDEO
Who Should Attend
Families participate in teams of four or more individuals. The program helps teams advance their thinking, look outward and gain altitude, envision the future, improve their long-term planning and alignment, and focus on their own interests and agenda.
The program views the family enterprise through the lens of ownership, helping family members to understand the important decisions that are theirs to make, and how to govern and plan for the longevity of their family’s enterprise activities.
Participants may include: Key owners and board members, and their successors; leaders in the family, ownership group, and business; family members with the interest and commitment to think about the future; next generation members who are deciding about their involvement in the family enterprise; other talent that a family wants in their thinking group as they discuss and develop plans for the future of their family enterprise.
Topics
Important questions addressed include:
- How family enterprises evolve over generations and how to succeed in today’s disruptive environment
- How technology is shaping industries and companies, and how family-owned enterprises must adapt
- How to articulate your family’s mission and core values
- How to manage generational transitions of leadership, ownership, governance, and wealth creation in this fast-changing environment and with the emergency of the Millennial Generation (Gen Y)
- How to decide on a portfolio strategy for your family company, investments, and family office
- How to decide among an array of emerging strategies for capitalizing, owning, and controlling your family company and investments
- How families are modernizing and remaining united in this mobile, globalized world
- How to govern the family, ownership group, company, family office, and other organizations of the family as the family and its activities become larger and more complex
- How to keep the family and its enterprise on the path of long-term success
- How to decide among the latest strategies for steering and sustaining a complex, multigenerational family enterprise, with a growing number of family owners, for another generation or more
The combined experience of faculty and participants produces deep understandings and even profound transformations for participating families. Your family will have conversations you never anticipated and will leave the program feeling closer and more aligned about your future as a result.
Faculty
Professor John A. Davis
Senior Lecturer, Family Enterprise Executive Programs, MIT Sloan
The Future Family Enterprise program is led by MIT Sloan Senior Lecturer John Davis, a pioneer in the family enterprise field and a globally recognized authority on family enterprise, family wealth, and the family office. Professor Davis joined MIT Sloan after leading the family enterprise area at Harvard Business School for more than 20 years. He is an award-winning teacher and researcher and is the creator of some of the field’s most impactful conceptual frameworks. Professor Davis is also Chairman of Cambridge Family Enterprise Group, a global advisory and research organization.
Courtney Collette
Lecturer, MIT Sloan
Courtney Collette is Lecturer on Family Enterprise at MIT Sloan School of Management. For more than 20 years, she has been an educator, researcher, and advisor to enterprising families and ownership groups around the world on long-term success strategies. She designs and teaches in open and custom MIT executive education programs on family enterprise, including the flagship Future Family Enterprise program, where she is also lead coach.
Jason Jay
Director, Sustainability Initiative, MIT Sloan
Jason Jay is a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Director of the Sustainability Initiative at MIT Sloan. He teaches courses on leadership, strategy, and innovation for sustainable business. Professor Jay engages students and alumni in hands-on projects with leading companies and organizations. These efforts help build a community of innovators for sustainability that includes MIT students and alumni, faculty and researchers, with partners in business, government, NGOs, and hybrid organizations. He is author of the book, Breaking Through Gridlock: The Power of Conversation in a Polarized World.
Jonathan Ruane
Research Scientist; Senior Lecturer, Global Economics and Management, MIT Sloan
Jonathan Ruane is a Senior Lecturer in the Global Economics and Management group at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a Research Scientist at MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE). His interests are at the intersection of digital technology, nascent markets and the global economy. He is an Adjunct Professor at Trinity College Dublin and a Fulbright recipient. Ruane teaches across Sloan (MBA, EMA, Exec Education) and EECS. He cofounded a number of pioneering graduate courses at MIT in the areas of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (with Professor Simon Johnson) and Quantum Computing (with Professor William Oliver). Both were the first of their kind in the world.
Hiram Samel
Senior Lecturer, Family Enterprise Executive Programs, MIT Sloan
Hiram Samel is a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He teaches global strategy, scenario planning and GO Lab. Prior to returning to MIT Sloan, he was at the University of Oxford where he was an Associate Professor of International Business at the Saïd Business School and a Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall. His research draws on multiple disciplines including comparative political economy, technology strategy, the economics of innovation, and labor studies.
Venue
MIT Sloan School of Management
One of the leading education institutions in the world, the Sloan School of Management is the business school of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The MIT Sloan campus is located in one of the densest startup and innovation hubs in the world in the neighborhood of Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts (USA). Participants of MIT Sloan's executive programs are provided the opportunity to experience the inspiration and energy of an unparalleled innovation ecosystem.