Family Journey

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COVID-19: What Will Your Family Remember?
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The COVID-19 pandemic reshaped many aspects of life in profound ways, including propelling families onto virtual platforms and social media to work, go to school, and stay connected. Future histories of this extraordinary period of change and resilience will draw heavily on the stories and values you preserve today and the days thereafter. This guide provides tips for families on ways to collect, archive, and share how their lives have been altered or upended during the pandemic. Looking forward and looking back, what will the memories be from your family history?

Effective Governance Strengthens Family Unity and Builds a Lasting Legacy
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Governance is a word often misunderstood by families and family offices, but it is essential for a long-lasting family legacy. Strong governance establishes a process for decision-making and conformity within a multi-generational family to promote communication and strengthen unity, helping to preserve wealth and solidarity for future generations. Although high-net-worth families and individuals increasingly recognize the importance of instituting formal governance structures, doing so presents a complex task, and it can be difficult to know where to start.

2020 FOX Foresight: Changes in the Family and the Family Office
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Families are becoming more complex, but a shared family vision and strategy are becoming easier to define. Business-centric families are becoming enterprise-centric and risk assessment is more sophisticated. Having impact in the future will require new strategies and new ways of thinking. The Family Office of old will need to make substantial adjustments to stay relevant in the coming decades. To thrive in the future, families must prepare themselves for dramatic change. Here we look at the seven most significant changes taking place as families adapt to the modern times.

2020 FOX Foresight: Meet Families of Impact
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Sophisticated families are looking for new ways to positively affect their communities and the world. Learn the innovative approaches of six families achieving lasting impact in our world.

2020 FOX Foresight: Take the Long-Term View
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The perennial question facing financially successful families is how to preserve the family and its well-being beyond the first generation. It isn’t the size of wealth that determines the family’s ability to build successful Enterprise Family—it’s realizing you have something worth preserving and setting a goal to maintain the family’s financial, social, and human capital for generations to come. Like all worthwhile journeys, it helps to start with a roadmap to ensure your family’s long-term success.

2020 FOX Foresight: Cultivate Family Readiness for Change
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As families of wealth and their Family Offices consider future success strategies, how ready are they to adapt? To help families prepare for the various stages of changes in the family journey, Dr. Jim Grubman shares the approach he uses—including the application of the Readiness Ruler—in this Q&A with FOX.

2020 FOX Foresight
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FOX Foresight keeps you up to date on our latest thinking about matters affecting Enterprise Families. It gives you our forward look on what we're learning from our members and subject matter experts. Please share it broadly with your family, your office, and your advisors. 2020 FOX Foresight is presented in 7 chapters:

Cross-Generational Communication: Are You Up for the Challenges?
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Research tells us communication is the most essential ingredient for sustaining wealth across generations. But, cross-generational communication can be particularly challenging, especially within families of wealth. Each generation’s habits, beliefs, and ideals are influenced by very different experiences, traditions, and societal norms. So how do you bridge the divide? In a gathering of more than 80 women ranging in age from 21 to 91 at a weekend-long learning event, several insights and recommendations on solving the cross-generational communication emerged.

Go Slow to Go Far
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Traditionally, wealth advisors use a succession planning framework that involves working with the founders to look downstream to the next generation for an effective “passing of the baton” strategy. In contrast, a multi-generational approach encourages each person within the family system to contemplate and share with others where they’ve come from, what they’ve come with, what they wish to pass on, and what they wish to leave behind.

What Matters Most to You?
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The most problematic challenge wealthy families face is not how to make more money, but how to ensure that it lasts. This requires focusing on something other than money. Successful families, whose wealth lasts for many generations, follow five key practices.