Responsible Purpose

The 2026 IESE ECGI Corporate Governance Conference brought academics, owners and advisers to Madrid on 16 March to ask whether corporate purpose can serve as a unifying frame for family firms. After a long day of presentations and discussion, Jordi Canals asked me to sum up. My answer, in short, is that purpose can help us see through the heterogeneity of family firms, but only when it is paired with responsibility. Purpose answers why a firm exists. Responsibility constrains how the firm pursues that purpose, by avoiding harm to people and planet.

Let me start where Josh Baron started, with my quote of the day. He observed that when you have seen one family office, you have seen one family office. The same is true of family firms more broadly. Heterogeneity is the empirical norm, not the exception. That is what makes statistical research on family firms hard, and it is what we heard from the empirical contributors. When Belén Villalonga, David Reeb, Margarita Tsoutsoura, Randall Morck and Marco Pagano ran the numbers, they found saints and sinners, winners and losers. Family firms can compound advantages over generations. They can also entrench nepotism, slow career progression, and pay lower wages to talented outsiders.

Conferences like ours are not immune to selection bias. As Marco Pagano articulated so well, we tend to invite the saints and the winners. The champions of family capitalism are the natural friends of an event designed to celebrate purposeful ownership. That is worth keeping in mind when reading any takeaway from a day like this, including this one.

Is purpose, then, the unifying structure that allows us to make sense of this heterogeneity? The presentations in Madrid argued that it can be, and I think they argued it successfully. Colin Mayer's framing of purpose as profitable solutions to the problems of people and planet provides a discipline that boards, owners and managers can act on. Anne Sanders and Steen Thomsen showed how enterprise foundations can institutionalise purpose across generations. Søren Staugaard Nielsen, speaking from the Ramboll Foundation, gave us a concrete demonstration of what that looks like in operation. Bruno Cassiman, Giovanni Valentini and David Wehrheim reminded us that family firms innovate differently rather than less. Josh Baron, speaking on family offices, showed that even when ownership becomes abstract, purpose remains the structural support. The case for purpose as a governance device is strong.

But Tor Bonnier's mention of the television series Succession gave me pause. Think of the Murdochs. In her 2012 MacTaggart Lecture, delivered in the aftermath of the News of the World phone hacking scandal, Elisabeth Murdoch argued that her family's business had no purpose beyond profit, and that profit without purpose is a recipe for disaster. Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch would dispute the diagnosis. They can point to a clearly defined purpose, something like building, sustaining and growing a global and influential media empire that generates profits while promoting a conservative and nationalist editorial agenda, for the benefit of society as they understand it. Purpose, in other words, is contested even within the same family. Without an external anchor, it can become whatever the controlling owner says it is.

That is why the organizing theme of ECGI over the past few years has been responsible capitalism. A clearly defined purpose is not in itself a guarantee that the firm does no harm. Consider the Adani Group, a family controlled Indian conglomerate. Its stated vision is Growth with Goodness, and its mission is to drive sustainable growth and create value for all stakeholders through innovation, collaboration and responsible business practices. Few corporate purpose statements sound more aligned with people and planet. Yet Adani is one of the largest coal mine operators in the world, and on that basis sits on the exclusion list of many institutional investors. Acting responsibly would mean reconciling the stated purpose with what the firm actually does to the climate. Corporate responsibility is the discipline of avoiding harm to employees, communities, the environment and minority shareholders, even where the conduct in question is not illegal. That is the external anchor that purpose alone does not provide.

Randall Morck reached for Tolstoy and reminded us that all happy families are alike, and each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. The family business analogue needs qualification. Families with a responsible purpose may well be rich and happy. But profit-only sinners can look perfectly happy too, sometimes spectacularly so. The unhappiness they generate is absorbed elsewhere, by employees, communities, ecosystems and future generations. The hypothesis worth testing is therefore not whether responsible families are happier in themselves, but whether they leave less unhappiness around them.

If there is a single phrase to take from the day, it is responsible purpose. That, in my view, is where the research and policy agenda on family firms now needs to head.

______________

Marco Becht is a Professor of Finance and the Goldschmidt Chair Professor of Corporate Governance and Stewardship at the Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management at Université libre de Bruxelles, and an ECGI Executive Director.

This blog is based on a discussion held at the 2026 IESE-ECGI Corporate Governance Conference Family Firms: Purpose, Economic Performance and Social Impact. Visit the event page to explore more conference-related blogs.

The ECGI does not, consistent with its constitutional purpose, have a view or opinion. If you wish to respond to this article, you can submit a blog article or 'letter to the editor' by clicking here.