What Family Enterprise Can Learn from the Wright Brothers
- Oct 2, 2016
- 6 min read
Updated: Apr 1
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on October 2, 2016 as a brief book recommendation paired with Robinson Crusoe. It has been expanded into a standalone practitioner-perspective piece exploring the family enterprise lessons in McCullough’s account of the Wright brothers. Robinson Crusoe is now covered in a separate Recommended Reading article.
On December 17, 1903, on the wind-swept sand flats of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, two brothers from Dayton, Ohio changed the world. They had no university education. They had no financial backers. They had no connections in government or industry. They funded the entire project from the profits of their bicycle shop for less than $1,000. Their government-funded competitor, Samuel Langley of the Smithsonian Institution, spent over $70,000 of public money and failed.
I have visited the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum to see the replica of the Wright Flyer, and the photograph at the top of this article is one I took there. Standing in front of the machine, you are struck by how fragile it looks. Canvas, spruce, and wire. That this object carried a human being into powered flight seems almost absurd. And yet it did, because the family behind it was extraordinary.
David McCullough’s The Wright Brothers is one of my favourite books. McCullough, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, drew on the Wright family’s private diaries, notebooks, and more than a thousand letters of family correspondence to tell the story. It is not just a book about the invention of flight. It is a book about what a family can accomplish when its members bring complementary strengths, shared values, and unwavering mutual support to a common mission.
For anyone involved in a family enterprise, the parallels are immediate.
What Made the Wright Brothers’ Partnership Work?
Wilbur was the analytical mind. He studied the published literature on aerodynamics, identified fatal flaws in the accepted data tables, and developed the theoretical framework that made controlled flight possible. Orville was the mechanical genius. He built the engines, fabricated the components, and translated Wilbur’s ideas into physical machines. McCullough makes clear that neither brother could have achieved flight alone.
This is a pattern we see in every successful family enterprise. The siblings or partners who build enduring businesses almost never have identical skills. They have complementary ones. One sees the strategy. The other builds the operations. One manages the external relationships. The other manages the internal systems. The families who recognise and respect these complementary roles, rather than competing over who contributes more, are the ones whose enterprises endure.
In the language of the Three-Circle Model (Tagiuri and Davis, Harvard Business School, 1978), Wilbur and Orville occupied the same sector: Sector 7, the intersection of family, ownership, and business. But their functional roles within that sector were entirely different. The partnership worked because each brother trusted the other’s domain. That trust was built in childhood, reinforced through decades of working side by side, and never broken.
Why Was Katharine Wright So Important?
McCullough’s book reveals a figure that most accounts of the Wright brothers overlook: their sister, Katharine. She was the only Wright sibling to attend university (Oberlin College). When Orville was nearly killed in a crash at Fort Myer in 1908, Katharine took a leave of absence from her teaching position and nursed him back to health over months of recovery. She later travelled with the brothers to Europe, where she managed their social obligations, handled correspondence, and navigated the cultural demands that two modest Ohio bicycle mechanics were not equipped to manage on their own.
McCullough writes that without Katharine, things might well have gone differently for the brothers. She was not an engineer. She did not fly. But she held the family system together while Wilbur and Orville focused on the work.
Every family office practitioner recognizes this role. In the families we serve at Northland, there is often a family member whose contribution is not financial or operational but relational and organizational. They coordinate the family meetings. They maintain communication between siblings who have drifted apart. They remember birthdays, manage the holiday gatherings, and serve as the informal mediator when tensions arise. This person’s contribution does not appear on any balance sheet, but when they step back or are lost, the family system often fractures.
The UHNW Institute’s Ten Domains of Family Wealth includes “Family Dynamics” as its own domain, separate from governance, finance, or estate planning. Katharine Wright is the embodiment of why that domain exists.
What Does the Wright Brothers’ Story Teach About Innovation and Risk?
The Wrights spent less than $1,000 developing powered flight. Their government-funded competitor spent more than $70,000 and produced a machine that crashed into the Potomac River on its maiden attempt. McCullough does not draw the business lesson explicitly, but it is impossible to miss: resourcefulness, iteration, and direct engagement with the problem will outperform bureaucratic spending and theoretical abstraction almost every time.
The brothers’ approach was intensely data-driven. When the published aerodynamic tables proved unreliable, they built their own wind tunnel and generated their own data from scratch. When their gliders did not perform as predicted, they did not abandon the project. They redesigned the wings, tested again, measured again, and adjusted. McCullough describes this process with a level of detail that makes the reader appreciate just how disciplined and methodical the Wrights were.
This is the approach that works in portfolio construction, in business building, and in family governance. Start with the evidence. Test your assumptions. When the data tells you that the established approach is flawed, have the courage to build something new. And fund it yourself, because nobody who is spending someone else’s money will ever be as resourceful as someone spending their own.
What Can Business Families Take from This Book?
Three lessons stand out.
First, complementary skills within a family are an asset, not a source of conflict. The Wrights did not argue about who deserved more credit. They each knew what the other brought. Families who can achieve that clarity about roles, and who build governance structures that respect each member’s contribution, tend to sustain their enterprises across generations.
Second, the non-operational family member matters more than most families acknowledge. Katharine Wright was not a co-founder. She was the person who made the co-founders effective. Recognizing and valuing that role is one of the most important things a family can do as part of its governance work.
Third, self-reliance and resourcefulness are not just virtues. They are competitive advantages. The Wrights outperformed a government-funded institution because they were closer to the problem, more disciplined in their experimentation, and more willing to accept failure as data. The independent approach, whether in aviation or in wealth management, creates outcomes that institutional models cannot replicate.
About the Book
Title: The Wright Brothers
Author: David McCullough (1933–2022)
Publisher: Simon & Schuster (2015)
Pages: 336
Awards: Combs Gates Award, National Aviation Hall of Fame; Ohioana Book Award
David McCullough twice received the Pulitzer Prize (for Truman and John Adams) and twice received the National Book Award. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honour.
Where to Start
If you run a family business, manage a family enterprise, or are part of a family navigating the question of how to work together across generations, this book will resonate. It is a story about flight, but it is also a story about what a family can accomplish when its members bring different gifts to a shared mission and trust each other enough to let those gifts be used.
Start with the book. Then, if the parallels to your own family are as clear as they were for me, we are here to talk about it.
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About the Author
Arthur Salzer, CFA, CIM is the Founder and CEO of Northland Wealth Management Inc., an independent multi-family office serving ultra-high-net-worth Canadian families. He wrote the Curve Appeal column in Financial Post Magazine from 2016 to 2022 and has appeared on Bloomberg, Reuters, BNN, and CBC. Arthur is a member of the CFA Society, the Family Firm Institute, and Family Enterprise Canada. The photograph of the Wright Flyer replica at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum was taken by Arthur during a personal visit.