Alden Graham Lank

  General Notes:

Professor Alden G. Lank is the founding Executive Director, former President, Chairman and current Honorary Member of the Executive Board of the Family Business Network and former Board member of the Family Firm Institute (FFI). He served on the faculty of the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) in Lausanne, Switzerland (and its predecessors Centre d'Etudes Industrielles and International Management Institute in Geneva, Switzerland) for more than 25 years where he was instrumental in creating the family business area whose purpose is to deliver educational and research programs in the field. He is the IMD Stephan Schmidheiny Professor of Family Enterprises Emeritus and Professor of Organizational Behavior Emeritus. His areas of special interest are change management, governance, corporate and family culture, communication, motivation, team building and leading the family firm. // Professor Lank, who holds a Bachelor of Liberal Arts degree from Middlebury College, Vermont along with the certificate in international business from the Centre d'Etudes Industrielles and a Doctor of Business Administration degree from the Harvard Business School, is on the editorial boards of the Family Business Review and the Journal of Managerial Psychology. He has served on the Board of several private and public organizations in Europe and North America. A prolific author on family business and general management topics, his most recent book (with Fred Neubauer) is The Family Business: Its Governance for Sustainability (London: Macmillan, 1998). Professor Lank has keynoted many international conferences and taught on numerous educational seminars and programs around the world. He received the Joseph Vago Cross-Cultural Award from FFI in 1997 and in 2001 he was elected a Fellow of FFI. In 2002, he was elected Honorary Fellow of the International Family Enterprise Research Academy and in 2003 he was elected Fellow of the Business Families Foundation.

Alden married "Dede" Constance Antoinette Van Zelm on Oct 5, 1957 in Scarsdale, NY. ("Dede" Constance Antoinette Van Zelm was born on Jan 24, 1935 in New Rochelle, NY, USA.)