In 1946, in Akron, Ohio, a husband and wife named Jerry and Goldie Lippman started a business in the washing machine in the basement of Goldie's parents' house. Goldie had worked in Akron's rubber...
In 1946, in Akron, Ohio, a husband and wife named Jerry and Goldie Lippman started a business in the washing machine in the basement of Goldie's parents' house. Goldie had worked in Akron's rubber plants during the war and knew how brutally hard it was to get the black residue off workers' hands; the couple's answer became GOJO Hand Cleaner, the name stitched from their own: GO for Goldie, JO for Jerome. Metal was still rationed, so Jerry packed the product into empty glass pickle jars he collected from restaurants once a week, washed, and refilled. Two generations later, that basement operation would put Purell on the counters of the world.
But this article is not about the founders, or even about the nephew, Joe Kanfer, who became president in 1973 and once kept production alive during the Arab oil embargo by buying scarce petroleum products from a phone booth. It is about Joe's eldest daughter, Marcella Kanfer Rolnick, and a question she asked that almost no family with a business ever asks out loud: "How can the family exercise leadership in ways other than through a day-to-day senior management role?"
The question, and the whole story around it, comes from Building Family Business Champions by Eric G. Flamholtz and Yvonne Randle, consultants who spent more than thirty-five years inside family companies and who use GOJO as the closing case of their book. In it they give a name to a role that families all over the world, and diaspora families especially, already play by instinct and almost never define: the face of the family. Not the CEO. Not a manager at all, necessarily. The person who represents the family's values and interests inside the business, so that the family's presence is felt without the family's hands being on every wheel. Marcella is their model, and her story is worth retelling carefully, because scattered families, with a business at home and members in three countries, need this role more than anyone, and most are performing it badly by accident instead of well on purpose.
Marcella grew up inside the company. "My first sibling was GOJO," she says in the book. "I was always there... and I grew up with GOJO at the dinner table." She worked there through high school and college, in market research, in the microbiology lab, on the factory floor. Her grandfather's uncle Jerry told her regularly that she had a future in the business, and everyone quietly filled in what that meant: someday, the top chair.
She took a different path, and the path is the lesson. After Princeton, consulting in New York. A return to GOJO when Purell was going consumer, where she deliberately managed her re-entry so as not to "prematurely send the signal that she had returned 'forever.'" Then Stanford for an MBA in 2002, trading daily voicemails with her father about the business, the two of them, in her words, "committed to going in eyes wide open" so that business would never damage the father-daughter relationship. And through those years she confronted the assumption everyone held on her behalf. Many colleagues believed she would become CEO. She had concluded that she should not, and that the family could contribute something the org chart had no box for.
The authors record exactly how she dismantled the wrong expectation: what she calls "frank conversations" with her GOJO colleagues about her actual future role. Read that phrase twice, because it is the cheapest and most skipped tool in family business. Ambiguity about a family member's role is never neutral. Every employee fills the silence with their own guess, and the guesses curdle: she's being groomed; she's being sidelined; the family is divided. Marcella replaced the guessing with statements. Then she defined the role she would actually play, and the book lets us see its job description. Stay "visible," especially at events, to support and promote the company's culture and values. Work on "ensuring that the preconditions for long-term success of GOJO are in place." And help the senior leadership team understand what she and her father needed to know to "make the best big decisions" for the company. Presence, stewardship, and information flow. No operational authority required for any of the three.
Here is the move that makes GOJO more than a feel-good story, and it is the part founders resist. As the family pulled out of day-to-day management, it did not loosen its grip on governance. It formalized it. For decades, GOJO's board had been the family plus the company president, and, as Marcella put it, "Our board meetings would often start to feel like another management discussion." In 2011 the family expanded the board to include independent directors, and by the time the book was written there were six of them, with expertise spanning finance, human resources, private equity, health care, strategy, and global marketing. One director was chosen partly because he was himself a fourth-generation member of his own family's business.
Two details deserve underlining. First, the independents were made full directors with real decision-making authority, not polite advisors, and, in Marcella's words, the family "established the expectation that they would speak their minds." They do, she adds. Second, the family thought about its own next generation while building the board: Marcella's younger sister, Mamie Kanfer Stewart, was invited to sit as a board observer, there to learn, grow her skills, and represent the family alongside Marcella and Joe. A seat with ears but not yet a vote: an apprenticeship in governance, running in parallel with the business itself.
And why did Marcella drive all this? Her stated reason is the purest sentence of family stewardship in the whole book. She knew she would one day be making the big calls without her father's and the longtime president's wisdom beside her, and she wanted to "be able to look my siblings in the eyes down the road and say we're making the best decisions we can." That is the face of the family speaking: accountable not to a boss, but to the siblings and cousins whose inheritance rides on her judgment.
There is one more GOJO tool worth stealing whole. The board frames every topic in one of three modes, depending on where the issue is in its life: generative, strategic, or fiduciary. Generative sessions are for questions that are new and not yet understood; strategic sessions are for shaping direction; fiduciary sessions are for oversight, checking that what should be happening is happening. Joe Kanfer says the generative sessions carry "the big payoff," because people with different experience "open up our thinking," while the fiduciary work gives the family "belts and suspenders" as it steps back from daily involvement. Three modes, one table. Most families run every conversation as a blur of all three and finish none.
Now the translation, and we should be honest about what we are translating from. Flamholtz and Randle's book is thoroughly American: GOJO is an Ohio company with trusts, share certificates, and a formal board, and the authors never discuss the extended-family enterprises, informal structures, and cross-border households that are ordinary across Africa and its diaspora. So what follows is our application, not theirs.
But look at what the role actually is, stripped of the boardroom: a person who carries the family's values into the enterprise, keeps the family informed enough to decide well, and manages everyone's expectations honestly. Diaspora families run on exactly this role already. The daughter in Atlanta who joins the call when the family shop in Kumasi considers a second branch. The brother in London whose blessing is quietly required before land is sold. The auntie who flies home every December and spends three days asking questions in the business before she relaxes. These are faces of the family. The problem is that nobody appointed them, nobody defined what they may and may not do, and so the role runs on assumption, the exact ambiguity Marcella spent years clearing with her frank conversations. The manager at home does not know whether the sister abroad is an advisor or a boss. The sister abroad does not know whether she is being consulted or merely informed. Money she sends arrives tangled with authority she may not have been given. Every one of these confusions has a GOJO-shaped fix.
Name the role. Choose, as a family, the person who will represent the family to the business, and say so to the business, in words, the way Marcella did. Write the job description in three lines borrowed straight from hers: keep the family's values visible, watch the preconditions of long-term success, and keep the family informed for the big decisions. Say plainly what the role is not: it is not a second general manager, and it does not override the person running the shop floor from six time zones away.
Then give the role a table. GOJO's answer was a real board; for a family enterprise without formal shares, the honest equivalent is a working family council with a calendar, and this is where the three modes earn their keep. A scattered family's council call can be labeled before it starts: tonight is generative, we are only exploring whether the business should serve the new estate going up across the road, no decisions; next month is strategic, we choose; the quarterly call is fiduciary, we review the numbers against what we agreed. The labels do for a WhatsApp-era family exactly what they do for GOJO's directors: they stop the dreaming, the deciding, and the checking from strangling each other. And copy the observer seat. Put one member of the next generation on the council calls with ears but no vote yet. It costs nothing, and it is how a family grows its next face instead of discovering, at the worst possible funeral, that it has none.
This is precisely the work the Family Council module in LegacyPot was built to hold: the named roles, the meeting rhythm, the agendas tagged by mode, the decisions recorded where a member in Nairobi and a member in New Jersey read the same words. A council that lives in one sibling's memory is a rumor; a council with a written record is an institution.
Here is the assignment, and a scattered family can complete the first half in a single call. Ask Marcella's question at your next family gathering, in your own words: how does this family lead its enterprise, other than by running it day to day? Then make two appointments. First, name your face of the family, the one person who will represent the family's values and interests to the business, and have that person hold the frank conversations, with the family and with whoever manages the business, that replace years of guessing with an hour of clarity. Second, set your council calendar, label each meeting generative, strategic, or fiduciary before it begins, and seat one observer from the next generation.
None of this requires a board, a lawyer, or a dollar. It required, at GOJO, only what it will require of you: one family member willing to define a role instead of drifting into it, so that she could one day look her siblings in the eyes and say the family made the best decisions it could. Your family has that member. Appoint them.