In 2023, I launched the Generational Business Podcast with a simple but urgent question: how do family businesses actually thrive in Nigeria?
I wanted to know if other next-generation leaders were wrestling with the same tensions I was wrestling with, and more importantly, how they were navigating them. These weren’t questions I could answer from a textbook. They came from lived experience, from sitting inside a family business and feeling the weight of legacy, expectation, and the complexity that comes when business and family share the same roof.
Two years later, I found myself at Harvard Business School for a course, surrounded by family business leaders from across the world, still searching for answers to the same questions.
What I discovered first surprised me
I expected regional differences. I expected the Nigerian experience to feel distinct from what a business family in Europe or Latin America would describe. What I found instead was striking in its consistency; regardless of geography, we were all dealing with the same fundamental tensions. The same conversations about succession. The same friction between generations. The same unspoken question hanging over every boardroom table: who is really in charge here?
