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Amy Schuman—Family business

Amy Schuman, a principal of The Family Business Consulting Group Inc., works with family businesses on leadership development, communication skills and team building. Her experience is centered on helping family members collaboratively create systems, structures and relationships to help them function as effective stewards of their enterprise. Amy creates leadership and career-development approaches tailored for sibling teams, young adults, teens and younger children in the next generation. She helps create conditions for successful generational transfer.

For more than 11 years, Amy directed organization development efforts for one of the top 10 companies listed among Fortune magazine's "100 Best Companies to Work for in America" and a third-generation, family-owned and -managed business. A key executive during the successful transition from second- to third-generation family management, she worked closely with the owning families to preserve the company's unique culture while re-interpreting and updating company practices to meet the intense demands of an increasingly competitive marketplace.

In July 1993, Amy participated with President Bill Clinton on a panel describing "The Future of the American Workplace." Amy has been an adjunct faculty member at Loyola University Chicago's Family Business Center since 1996. She serves as a coach and facilitator in Loyola's Next Generation Leadership Institute, an intensive, two-year program during which men and women who desire to assume leadership positions in their family businesses are coached in developing leadership skills. She also facilitates a monthly Peer Lab where participants explore the unique challenges of family business leadership. Amy teaches group process and facilitation skills in Loyola's Family Business Communication Institute and leads Chicago's only support group for women in family business.

Amy has made presentations at the Family Firm Institute Conference and Family Business Network meeting in Stockholm, Sweden. She has been an adjunct faculty member of the Lake Forest College Graduate School of Management and has taught MBA students at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has a B.A. in psychology from Oberlin College in Ohio and has completed work towards a master's degree in organization development at Bowling Green State University, also in Ohio. She received her MBA from The Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.