“Giving new life to a city is one of the most beautiful things that anyone can do,” says Alan Faena, as he looks out on the Miami neighbourhood that now bears his name. “It’s one of the things I’m most proud of, both here and back home in Buenos Aires. These are my gifts to the people, not only for today’s generation but also for future generations.” And what a gift the Faena District is indeed.

Spanning five blocks adjacent to the white sands of Miami Beach, the neighborhood is nothing less than an urban oasis of sensory delights. Its buildings – old and new – somehow fuse perfectly with their natural surroundings. Absolutely nothing is mundane here, not even the multistory parking garage, whose exterior could easily pass for that of an ultra-modern cultural center or designer shopping mall. Incidentally, the Faena District also possesses both of those things.

“I think it’s something like less than one third of family businesses that make it from the first to the second generation and half of those don’t make it to the third generation,” says Adriana Cisneros. “I’m the third generation in our business, so I really hope I’m going to be one of those that survives. Who knows, I might completely mess up, but hopefully not.” Messing up seems a rather unlikely prospect going by Adriana’s record to date. The company is in robust health under her leadership. She has recently returned from a whistle-stop tour of Central and South America, where Cisneros Interactive has become the sole reseller of Facebook in nine countries, the only nations on earth where the social media giant will not manage its own sales.

Facebook chose to work through Cisneros Interactive because it already has the region’s most advanced advertising network. “I started Cisneros Interactive, our digital division four years ago,” says Adriana. “Our aim from the outset has been to create the largest advertising network in Latin America and also the smartest. When we began, others were trying to do similar things, but in a very country-specific way. No one really dared to do it pan-regionally. I used the same architecture to build the business that my father did when he brought satellite television to Latin America three decades ago.”

I went to Georgetown University, where I majored in finance. After graduation, I went to New York, where I worked for two years in investment banking at Morgan Stanley, before attending Harvard Business School. At that point, I had to decide if I wanted to go back into investment banking or return to the family business. It was 1983 and NFI was primarily a trucking business with very small warehousing, real estate, and truck leasing components.

I’m not completely sure exactly what I was thinking at the time, but I probably felt a certain obligation to join the family business. I’d kind of grown up within NFI. From junior high school onwards, I’d always helped out at the company during summer vacations. I’d worked in the maintenance shop and as a loader in the warehouse. We had always discussed business around the family table as far back as I can remember. So I guess you could say it was in my blood.

When I entered the business, I also had two brothers and a sister working alongside me. So I not only had to figure out how to work with my father, but also with my siblings too. As we were coming up through the ranks, our father wisely refused to appoint any of us as his successor. ‘If I pick one of you,’ he said to us, ‘the others will always resent me and our relationship will suffer.’ Instead, he told us to work it out among ourselves, after which he would sell the business to us.

Problem-solving and progress-making are second nature to Mohamed Amersi. For many years, he worked as a lawyer for two of the world’s leading firms, focusing upon highly complex equity-related deals. He subsequently set up his own advisory and investment firm specializing in technology, media, and telecoms. In 2015, he and his family created the Amersi Foundation, which particularly supports causes relating to education, poverty, conflict, and social cohesion.

The pandemic has definitely felt like a war at times. But it’s an unusual, asymmetric kind of war. The enemy we’re fighting is one that we can’t see or touch. It doesn’t deploy tanks, fire bullets or have a nuclear arsenal. But it does have hidden bases in pretty much every single part of the Earth. And our current weaponry is unable to defeat this enemy – an enemy that is only interested in killing us.

Like most people, I have had to learn a lot very quickly about COVID-19. I had no in-depth understanding of what ‘triaging,’ ‘social distancing,’ and ‘self-isolation’ were all about. We’ve all learned a completely new lexicon, a new way of living and have a new way of thinking about things. It’s a strange paradox, but we’ve had to stay apart in order to come together against this pandemic.