In Belgium there is a family that has owned a steel wire company since 1880. Bekaert employs 27,000 people, sells into more than 120 countries, and is listed on the Brussels stock exchange, yet the...
In Belgium there is a family that has owned a steel wire company since 1880. Bekaert employs 27,000 people, sells into more than 120 countries, and is listed on the Brussels stock exchange, yet the family still controls it, five generations in. The fifth generation numbers 180 people, 135 of them adults. And a few times a year, some of those adults gather in the evening for a formal presentation followed by an informal session with a buffet, where the topic might be the company's product range, or its competitive strategy, or, in the sessions one member calls the most successful of all, how to read a balance sheet.
They call it the Bekaert Academy. It is a school whose only subject is the family's own enterprise, and whose only students are the people who will inherit it.
Sophie Lammerant, a fourth-generation member who directs the family's council, describes the Academy in an interview in Governance in Family Enterprises: Maximising Economic and Emotional Success (2014), the family-business governance handbook by Alexander Koeberle-Schmid, Denise Kenyon-Rouvinez, and Ernesto Poza. She is precise about what the Academy is not: "It is not a leadership program for future executives, nor a training program to become a board member." It is an ownership education program. And in that distinction sits an idea most families, at every scale, have never once acted on: that owning something well is a learned skill, different from running it, and that a family which teaches its children nothing about what they will inherit has not protected them from worry. It has scheduled their failure.
Think about the jobs in any family enterprise. The person who runs it learns by running it. Employees are trained. Even the accountant had to sit exams. The only role for which there is no training, anywhere, in almost any family, is the role of owner: the person whose signature sells the land, whose vote hires or fires the manager, whose patience or panic decides whether the enterprise survives a bad year.
We assume ownership needs no teaching because it looks passive. You hold the thing; what is there to learn? But watch what an untrained owner actually does. Handed a stake in a business they do not understand, they either meddle in operations because that is the only involvement they can picture, or they drift into treating the enterprise as a cash machine, judging every year by what it paid them. Both behaviors, multiplied across a generation of heirs, kill firms. The Bekaert family's answer is that ownership is an active competence with its own curriculum, and Lammerant names its target plainly. The purpose, she says, is to teach the next generation how to become "responsible," and not "entitled" owners: "owners who feel committed, who keep informed, who try to understand the business and learn how to analyze its performance; owners who identify with the family values, who try to be good stewards."
Then she adds the sentence that makes this everyone's business, not just a steel dynasty's: "If you don't have a thriving business, you are in trouble, but if you don't have a strong and united family you are also at risk." Two curricula, then. The numbers, and the bonds.
The detail that makes the Bekaert story trustworthy is that their first attempt collapsed. "We had a first trial when the G5 were too young and not sufficiently involved in the process," Lammerant says. "It did not work." For roughly ten years afterward, the family kept the connection alive with humbler tools: informational meetings, company visits, family weekends, a DVD of company history and family testimonies. Then in 2006, at a family dinner, she and a few cousins, one of them the family council chairman, relaunched the idea properly. This time they built it with the students instead of for them: a committee of three fourth-generation and three fifth-generation members set the objectives, content, and schedule together, and tested the proposal on the generation it was meant to serve before launching.
The curriculum they settled on is worth recording, because it is a template any family can shrink. The Academy has covered the company's products, markets, clients, and competitors; strategy, including the family doing its own analysis of the firm's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats; how the governance actually fits together, meaning the assembly, the board, the executive committee, and the family council; two hands-on sessions on the balance sheet, the profit and loss statement, and key ratios, in which the heirs analyzed Bekaert's own numbers in small groups; and wealth management, taught by a next-generation member from his own experience. Sessions draw between 15 and 40 participants. The results compound outside the classroom too: the fifth generation began organizing its own events, ran its own survey of whether their generation even wanted to keep family cohesion and control, and took charge of the Academy itself. Fifty family members traveled together to visit the company's operations in China.
Notice three design choices hiding in that story. The teaching is concrete, anchored in the family's own enterprise rather than business theory. The most successful session was the most practical one, heirs bent over their own company's accounts. And the program aims deliberately at what Lammerant calls emotional ownership, pride and bonding, not just competence, because an heir who understands the numbers but feels nothing will still sell.
Why does the book place this interview at its close? Because ownership education is the load-bearing answer to the question the whole book circles: whom is family governance actually protecting the enterprise from? For a listed company, governance codes exist to protect shareholders from misbehaving managers. The authors argue family enterprises face the opposite exposure, and they say it without cushioning: "the objective is to protect the owners from themselves; establishing checks and balances to prevent abuse of power or incompetence by owners." The founder who will not retire when the firm needs him to. The heir who treats a board seat as a birthright. The branch that knows nothing about the business but votes on everything.
You can write rules against all of that, and the book urges families to write them, with four quality tests for any family's written code: built on broad consensus, fitted to the family's specific circumstances, flexible enough for a family's variety, and clear and easy to understand. But here is the dependency families miss. Every one of those tests assumes owners who can participate. A consensus among people who cannot read the accounts is a consensus about feelings. A rule that heirs must be "qualified" is empty if no one ever taught them what qualified means. Untrained owners cannot even tell whether their own rules are being followed. Education is not an accessory to governance. It is the soil governance grows in, which is why the failed first Academy mattered enough to try again.
The Bekaert story carries one more warning about waiting for a crisis to force the lesson. A Belgian law required listed company boards to reach 30 percent women directors by 2016. The family's own rule set the minimum age for business board directors at 35, which at the time excluded the entire fifth generation, so the law forced what Lammerant calls "deep reflection" on their governance, branch representation, and the future role of the next generation, perhaps including coaching for future board members so new directors could "move up the learning curve quickly." That specific law is Belgian, of a particular moment, and we flag it as one country's example rather than a universal benchmark. The principle underneath is universal: the world will change the rules on your family without asking, through law, marriage, migration, or death, and the families that cope are the ones whose bench of educated owners is already deep when the change arrives.
Here the book ends and our translation begins, and we say so plainly, because this is where the African handover lives or dies. Bekaert is a fifth-generation listed multinational; the book has almost nothing to say about a first-generation shop in Nakuru or a family plot in Wakiso. But strip the Academy to its skeleton and nothing about it requires scale. Its parts are: a named gathering, a curriculum about your own enterprise, hands-on work with real numbers, teaching duties shared with the generation being taught, and food. Every one of those is available to a family whose entire enterprise is one shop, three rental rooms, and a plot of land.
What does the shrunk version look like? One evening per school term, named something your family will actually say, the Academy sounding as fine in a two-room house as in Flanders. Session one: what the family owns, where the papers are, what each thing earns and costs. There are teenagers who have eaten from a shop for fifteen years and could not tell you what it clears in a month; there are diaspora children paying school fees for cousins with no picture at all of the family's assets. Session two: the cashbook, gone through line by line with the actual figures, the teenager doing the arithmetic. Session three: how decisions get made, who may join the business and on what conditions, what happens when someone needs money, who speaks for the family when an official or a buyer comes calling. Session four: the family's story, told by the eldest present, because pride is curriculum too. Then repeat, deeper each year, and hand pieces of the teaching to the young as soon as they can carry them, the way Bekaert's fifth generation now runs its own program.
Two Bekaert lessons transfer whole and will save you years. Do not start too young: a seventeen-year-old can read a cashbook with interest; a nine-year-old is there for the buffet, and that is fine, but do not call it the program. And build it with the heirs, not merely for them. The first Academy was something done to the next generation, and it died. The second was something done with them, and it is the one that filled a plane to China.
Be honest, too, about why families skip this, because the reason is rarely laziness. Teaching heirs the numbers means showing them the numbers, and many parents keep the money dark on purpose: fear of raising entitled children, fear of village talk, fear that a child who knows the shop's takings will start counting an inheritance. The Bekaert result argues the opposite. Secrecy does not produce humble heirs; it produces untrained ones, who inherit at the worst possible moment, at a funeral, with no map, primed for the land dispute that follows. What Lammerant reports from education is "increased motivation, deeper knowledge, more respect, and trust," a generation that wants to see more of each other. Knowledge, delivered with values attached, is what entitlement is not.
This is also where the work outlives you. The sessions your family runs, the story the eldest tells, the year-by-year record of what each heir has been taught and can do: keep them in LegacyPot's Wisdom Library, and the curriculum itself becomes an heirloom, so the academy does not die with its founder but is simply taken over, the way the fifth generation took over Bekaert's.
This month, hold the first session. Pick the date, name the gathering, and invite every family member of roughly sixteen and above, wherever they live; a phone on a video call makes the diaspora a front-row seat. Bring three things: a one-page list of what the family owns, the actual cashbook or statements for the last three months, and one question with a real answer, such as what this family does when someone needs money urgently. Let the youngest person present do the arithmetic out loud. Before you close, fix the date of the next session and give one heir one piece of it to teach.
A family in Belgium needed a failed attempt, a relaunch at a dinner, and two decades of evenings to turn 180 heirs into owners on purpose. Your class is smaller and your enterprise fits on one page, which means you can be a full generation ahead of them by Christmas. The inheritance is not the shop. The inheritance is a person who knows how to hold the shop, and that person is built in evenings, one term at a time.