Continuity through generations in family businesses is what we strive for, but to achieve it, families must work hard to create the best possible governance. I have learned this from my own experience in my family business, and I want to share it with other families and learn from them, as I know from my job at LGA. I am passionate about seeing how we put governance structures, incredibly complex ones, to work for the benefit of the family business.
Gustavo is a partner at Lansberg, Gersick Advisors (LGA), advising family enterprises throughout Latin America on complex corporate governance matters. Gustavo is also actively involved at LGA in helping the Chair, directors, and executives of family enterprises realize the Board’s full potential. Gustavo has extensive experience participating in many families and non-family Corporate Boards.
He has also helped families create and run Family Councils and the Family Office within complex Family Governance Systems. He is also a frequent speaker at FBN, Owners Council, IDB-Invest and TEC Monterrey, as well as a professor at the executive-education program “Governance & Continuity in Family Business” at Universidad ICESI (Cali, Colombia)
Gustavo is presently in the Board of Directors of CARVAJAL S.A., where he served as its Chairman for six years, a family business founded over 115 years ago, where he also worked for more than 30 years in several Latin American countries, including Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil. At his family company, he has also participated for over twenty years in the family council and has counseled several Latin-American families in the subject of the family business. He is the Chairman of the Board of the CARVAJAL Foundation, and member of the board of ICESI University, and BOLIVAR Group (Financial Group), all of them in Colombia.
Gustavo was Ambassador of COLOMBIA in FRANCE and UNESCO in Paris. As ambassador, he was instrumental in the acceptance of the accession process of COLOMBIA to the OECD. At UNESCO, participated as President of the Committee of the World Heritage Session in Cambodia in June 2013. He was also concurrent Ambassador of Colombia to MONACO and ALGERIA.
He holds a BA degree in Economics and Political Science from Adelphi University in Garden City, New York, and an MBA degree from BABSON College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Has attended several executive-level courses at Stanford, Harvard and Northwestern.
Gustavo is Colombian and speaks Spanish and English fluently. He lives in Cali, Colombia, with his wife, Juana, and their three children.
