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.
Family Journey
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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.
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:
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.
Market research reveals that nearly 70% of intergenerational wealth transfers fail by the third generation and almost 90% by the fourth. These are compelling statistics which have become top of mind concerns for many families as they plan their wealth transition to the next generation. For Australian families, there are three key challenges they face when transitioning wealth. A closer look shows what they are doing to beat the statistics and ultimately succeed, beginning with preserving family harmony and unity.
Getting the Conversation Started
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Succession is not just about money or property. It means confronting family relationships and taking the time to make sure that the drivers for succession planning connect personal motivations, the purpose of wealth, and specific family issues. It requires an emotional commitment to a process that once started must run its course, including having conversations about fairness, equity, choices about who is in “the family,” and their capabilities for current and future roles.