The trust that holds a family business together for generations is private by design — what changes when that same trust is asked to hold together people who have no reason to trust each other?
Family businesses have always known how to build trust across generations, within communities, through decades of relationships that outlast any single deal or election cycle. The open question is whether that same trust can be extended outward — not just protecting the family's interests, but rebuilding the coalitions needed to solve problems no single actor, company, government, or civil society organization, can solve alone.
This conversation between Farhad Forbes and Alexis du Roy de Blicquy treats business families as convening infrastructure: the patient, long-horizon relationships built with employees, communities and institutions as a distinct capability for assembling coalitions that shorter-term actors struggle to sustain. It asks what it takes to turn a family's private network of trust into a public good, bringing governments, civil society and even competitors together around problems where alignment is scarce and self-interest is easy.
Farhad will share how he has navigated the tension between loyalty to family and openness to outsiders, between control and shared ownership of outcomes, and between speed and the slower work of building alliances that hold. The conversation moves beyond collaboration as a virtue to examine it as infrastructure: the deliberate architecture business families build to make transformation durable beyond their own walls.
