Claudia Binz Astrachan

Claudia witnessed first-hand the devastating consequences of troubled family dynamics in her own family. Following her grandparents’ death, the family’s relational fabric became undone, leading to the sale of the family enterprise. She has also seen family business from the other side, with her father being a successful non-family CEO of 25 years at bio-familia, a family enterprise in rural Switzerland.

After completing her business administration studies at the University of Bern in Switzerland, Claudia earned a Marketing traineeship at the largest Swiss bank, UBS. Amidst the financial crisis of 2008, she left the banking industry to take on a research and teaching position at Lucerne School of Business in Switzerland, while pursuing a Ph.D. at the family business institute at Witten/Herdecke University in Germany.

Claudia has been leading the Family and Business Program at Lucerne School of Business since 2014, and continues to provide research-based and peer-oriented learning opportunities for family-owned companies in Switzerland even after her move to the United States in 2013. In 2019, she joined Andrew Keyt as the Head of the Governance Practice at Keyt Consulting – a role that she continues to hold at Generation6. In this capacity, Claudia worked extensively with the boards of some of the largest private family companies in the United States.

Claudia’s research and practice are informed and shaped by her understanding of the role of family cohesion, effective communication and conflict management, and family and business governance that align with the values, culture, and objectives of the owning family. She has received awards for her research from scholarly and business organizations alike. Claudia is a board member of the International Family Enterprise Research Academy and a former family business chair at the European Academy of Management. She is a visiting scholar at Witten/Herdecke University in Germany, and at Jönköping University in Sweden.

Claudia is based in Atlanta. She is fluent in English and German, and conversant in French, Italian, and Spanish.