Governance, Shared Ownership, and Shared Decisions

Ben Casper and Teresa Gledhill are Bill and Joan Casper’s two oldest children. They were born less than a year apart and experienced the early adventures of poverty that their parents faced. They both have lived most of their lives on or near the family farm in Basin City, Washington. In 1957, The Caspers, with their three small children, aged two and under, moved into a shell of a home they built on their farm in southeastern Washington. They traded the comforts of plumbing, lawn, and kitchen cabinets for a dream.

Today, several of their nine children and one of their fifty-two grandchildren have homes or businesses on the land Bill and Joan tamed in the Columbia Basin. “The Nine,” as the grandchildren often refer to them, collectively own farmland under pivot irrigation and a lakefront cabin on Priest Lake, Idaho.

Robert Duncan is Chairman Emeritus of Duncan Aviation, the largest aviation maintenance company in the world. Duncan succeeded his father in business and reinvented the company from an aviation sales company to an aviation maintenance company. He has two children. His son, Todd, is now Chairman of Duncan Aviation and has two grandsons involved in the business. Duncan is also an avid art collector and lives with his wife in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Katharina Pick is clinical associate professor of organizational behavior at the Drucker School of Management. She teaches MBA and executive courses in Organizational Behavior and Theory, Leadership Development, Teams, Women in Leadership, and Design Thinking and the Creative Process. She also provides individual coaching for developing leaders across a variety of contexts including museum leadership and policing.

Pick’s research examines the internal group dynamics of corporate boards of directors with a particular focus on the psychology of board membership, speaking-up behavior, and board process in decision making and conflict resolution. Recently, she has written on the subject of boardroom dynamics and board leadership. Other research interests include gender and leadership, role negotiation and social identity in high-status groups, and sense-making and diffusion of deviant organizational behavior. She received her PhD in Organizational Behavior and MA in Sociology from Harvard University and holds an MSW from University of Southern California.

David Specht comes to the Drucker School Global Family Business Institute with a personal mission to “preserve families and perpetuate businesses” after spending nearly five years developing the Family Dynamics Program at Wells Fargo Private Bank. Prior to that he founded Advising Generations, a family business consulting firm and served on the faculty at the University of Nebraska and established their family business program. Specht is a two time author. His latest book is called, “The Family Business Whisperer.”

Specht is fluent in Spanish and lived for two years in Uruguay. He is also happily married and has six children. He studied Business Administration at Brigham Young University-Idaho and received a Master’s Degree in Tax and Financial Planning from San Diego State University.