Articles of Interest – Family Goals and Culture

Business families require effective leadership throughout the system to fulfill their potential. A lot of attention goes to who will be the next leader of the business, and appropriately so. But there is another area in which leadership can bring great value to the family – the role of “family champion.” Family champions are visionary catalysts who invest energy into the family-business system to support and develop the family-ownership advantage.
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When the members of the class of 2010 entered Harvard Business School (HBS), the economy was strong and their post-graduation ambitions could be limitless. Just a few weeks later, the economy went into a tailspin. They spent two years recalibrating their worldview and their definition of success. The graduating class asked HBS professor Clay Christensen to address them on how to apply his principles and thinking to their personal lives. He shared with them a set of guidelines that have helped him find meaning in his own life.
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Research shows that families that have managed to remain successful across generations have a different definition of wealth. These families see wealth as more than financial capital. They tend to see the true wealth of their family as lying in those things that will sustain and replenish the financial asset of the family and help to ensure family stability. These include: Human Capital, Cultural Capital, Social Capital and Financial Capital.
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Withersworldwide recently commissioned a research study to find out what it means to be wealthy in the 21st century, and whether successful families around the world are driven by wealth generation, wealth preservation or the application of their wealth. Five pearls of wisdom emerged which help to disclose the secret of family success. Each reveals how wealth can be stewarded for the benefit of individual families and society at large.
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In working with wealthy families over the past 20 years, first as an estate planning attorney and then as a family consultant, Matt Wesley has come to see that the same problem that plagues corporate transitions plagues wealth transitions in families. Failures of family culture decimate wealth. The failure of family culture erodes more wealth during generational transitions than poor planning, taxation, investment management, or the law of large numbers.
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Imagine you – as an extraordinarily successful business founder – have just joined the exclusive ranks of the 200,000 people around the world with a net worth over $30 million. Your laser-like focus on the business is about to give way to what we call a Second Act. A successful Second Act often poses an existential crisis because it requires a very different approach than the First Act did. The First Act involved an intense drive to build the business. Your Second Act is probably going to involve the creation of some sort of family enterprise, meaning that there will be some collective family decision-making over shared assets such as a foundation, a portfolio of investments, perhaps some businesses and, likely, family properties.
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