Rethinking Legacy: How Family Businesses Actively Construct the Future From the Past

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Professors Gartner, Radu-Lefebvre, and Davis will challenge the intuitive idea that legacy is simply a fixed inheritance: values, knowledge, or a mandate handed down from one generation to the next. Drawing on their research, they will reframe legacy as something families and businesses actively construct over time, through relationships, stories, governance practices, and lived experience, rather than something ready-made in the past waiting to be received.

They will walk through the Legacy Framework's five core questions: what legacy is, who sends and receives it, why, how, and in what contexts it survives or dies. They will also present the process model showing how legacy moves from senders (founders, the senior generation, the organization itself) through vehicles such as storytelling, mentoring, and governance structures, to receivers (next-gen members, employees, the business).

What we'll learn:

• Legacy is not something families "have." It's a process they continually build, negotiate, and re-narrate, and it can function as an asset, a liability, or a paradox depending on how it's handled.
• Four distinct kinds of legacy are often bundled together yet pull in different directions: founder legacy, family legacy, family-firm legacy, and entrepreneurial legacy.
• Legacy and achievement are often at odds. Senior generations may view the business itself as the legacy to protect, while next-gen members want to pursue their own achievements, sometimes in a different direction entirely.

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