Ranked #1 in the World
In addition to our partner Tec de Monterrey (which I covered in an earlier posting), I visited last week Universidad de Monterrey: a beautiful, thriving university which is the Mexican version of the American liberal art college concept. It’s new president, Tony Dieck, is not only a good friend and a fellow graduate of Georgia Tech (Go Jackets!), but one of the founders of the joint Thunderbird-Tec de Monterrey Global MBA. (By the way, Monterrey is one of the most dynamic business hubs, not only in Mexico, but according to some media rankings, in Latin America at large. Monterrey is the home of some of Mexico’s largest companies and the Latin American hub of important multinationals. It has a very strong family business tradition and great higher education institutions).
The University’s center for family business (UDEM – Centro de Empresas Familiares) organizes a series of programs and conferences serving the many family businesses in the area. Thunderbird Professor Ernesto Poza, who heads Thunderbird’s Global Enterprise initiative helped me put together the presentation I delivered (and which is covered in Spanish by the local newspaper Milenio). 
Ernesto’s work with family businesses around the world has shown that family businesses can have significant advantages over management controlled ones, especially at times of uncertainty and crisis, when families can provide the type of “patient capital” that financial markets can’t. Family patient capital will continue to invest if necessary during difficult times, owners will exercise true oversight, and management will be most likely to act with a long-term horizon. Somehow the Wall Street meltdown would have seemed far less likely if the key players had operated under a family-controlled governance system… or at least under a similar value system.
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