Meet the 2020 Nominees for the FFI Board of Directors

Prepared Exclusively for FFI Members

June 19, 2020

T

he FFI board of directors provides strategic vision and oversight for the development of the organization. Over the past few months, the 2020 Nominating Committee has solicited suggestions for nominees, and interviews with potential candidates have been held. The Committee is pleased to announce the following nominees for four-year terms on the FFI Board of Directors. Voting will be conducted by electronic ballot, which will be sent to FFI members in late August. New board members will take office following the annual meeting held in October.

Meet the 2020 Nominees

Heinz-Peter Elstrodt

Heinz-Peter Elstrodt, PhD, is an advisor to and board member of family businesses and a guest lecturer at London Business School. He is also a Senior Partner Emeritus at McKinsey & Company.

In his long career as a Senior Partner with McKinsey, he founded and led McKinsey’s global Family Business practice. He has been working closely with a large number of leading family businesses, mostly in Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. His work aimed at taking the whole system into account, i.e., including generational transitions, shareholder, family, and corporate governance issues as well as corporate strategy, finance, and organization. He has been a frequent speaker on family businesses, e.g., at the World Economic Forum, and has published extensively. In addition, he led the Latin American region of McKinsey from Brazil, and he was a member of the Council of the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), working extensively on issues of economic development in the region.

After his retirement from McKinsey in 2015, he moved from São Paulo, Brazil, to London, UK, joined some boards of directors, and started to teach at London Business School on family businesses. He also still acts as an advisor.

Heinz-Peter earned a Dr. rer. pol. in Economics from the University of Augsburg, Germany , and a degree in Business Administration and Industrial Engineering from the University of Karlsruhe, Germany.

Statement of Purpose

Most of my professional life over the last 30 years has consisted in working with owners of large corporations around the world. I am now at a stage where my focus is to give back through engagements in education and mentoring, be it of business families or professionals who work with them. FFI seems to me the perfect opportunity to do so and I am excited to explore it. I also want to continue to be involved in research. There are still quite insufficient answers to fundamental questions, e.g., “Under which conditions is family ownership a better form of ownership vs. alternatives?” These questions have accompanied me all my professional life both in a very practical and an academic sense and I am looking forward to engage with the FFI network to continue to explore them. And of course, as a board member, I want to strengthen FFI as an institution and enhance its mission, which is close to my heart.

Ken McCracken

Ken McCracken is an FFI Fellow and as a family business consultant and teacher, he has worked in parts of Europe, Asia, and North America. He has supported FFI through membership, teaching in the early days of the GEN Program, and by contributing to the Research Applied Board of Family Business Review, FFI Practitioner, and FFI on Monday. He was also chair of the Conference Program Committee for FFI 2019 in London. Ken is the author and teacher of family business education programs for the Society of Trusts and Estate Practitioners (STEP) and is a former recipient of the FFI Interdisciplinary Award and the STEP Award for Family Business Advisor.

Statement of Purpose

I am very pleased to be nominated to join the FFI board. As a global community of learning and practice, FFI is in a great position to generate ideas and spread information that will help family enterprises, educators, and advisors cope with the new normal.

If appointed to the board, I also want to promote discussion about how to build more consulting businesses of scale in different cultures. These businesses are needed to provide long-term support for enterprising families and to enable a new generation of advisors to make consulting their first choice of vocation.

THANK YOU

Thank you to the FFI members who participated in this process and especially to the 2020 Nominating Committee for its selection of these candidates:

Fabian Bernhard, co-chair
EDHEC Business School

Dan Frosh, co-chair
Cambridge Advisors to Family Enterprise

Russel Baskin
Family Enterprise Xchange

Peter Leach
Peter Leach Associates

Kathy Wiseman
Working Systems, Inc.

Thanks to Current Members of the FFI Board of Directors

Officers:
Debbie Bing, chair; Carlo Salvato, vice chair; Asher Noor, secretary; Sandra McNeely, treasurer

Directors:
Fabian Bernhard, Mary Duke, Peter Englisch, Dan Frosh, Lanie Jordan, Greg Khost, Cynthia Lee, Natalie McVeigh, Lisa Morel, Maya Prabhu, Jonathan Ramos, Borja Raventos

Dates to Remember

JUN
22

FFI On Monday with Ian Macnaughton and Paul Lermitte
Behavioral Interpersonal Finance: Actions for Intergenerational Engagement
Register for 10:00AM ET
Register for 5:00PM ET

JUN
29

FFI On Monday with James Olan Hutcheson
Behavioral Economics and CEO Decision Making in Family Firms
Register for 10:00AM ET

JUL
1

Last day to submit a case for the Family Enterprise Case Competition
view details

Previous Edition

One of the hallmarks of FFI is its ongoing commitment to advance the field through publishing, practice, and research. In May, we were pleased to announce the 2020 Achievement Award Recipients and last week we announced the 2020 Academic Award Recipients. Today, we celebrate more outstanding contributions to the field by announcing the 2020 Family Business Review Award recipients. These awards will be presented at the FFI Conference in October.