One of the most common concerns families have revolves around how to share wealth with family members without encouraging entitlement. With forethought and care, giving well and wisely can bring families together and strengthen the bonds between generations. The steps to giving wisely—and fostering flourishing over entitlement—include clarifying your intentions, understanding your recipients, communicating more rather than less, and letting go of what you cannot control.
Family Learning
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Family businesses thrive when collaborative learning and stakeholder engagement remain high. In this environment, resilience increases enabling all levels of the organization to assess threats and respond effectively to crises. Effective decision-making (growing assets, good outcomes) also develops in this setting, facilitating the development of a new generation of leaders ready for the demands of an ever changing business environment. Flourishing businesses, of course are challenged by changes in the external marketplace and competitive challenges.
Top 5 Traits of Effective Family Philanthropy
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For many families of wealth, creating a long-lasting legacy is a fundamental goal, one that shapes both personal and financial decisions. And many of these families want that legacy to reach beyond the boundaries of family, making a positive impact on their communities and the world. For the Anderson family, they made a purposeful decision to approach philanthropy as a family enterprise. In preparation for a new generation coming of age, the family undertook a process of evaluating and fine tuning its philanthropic strategies.
Family Communications & Interactions - How Can Technology Help the Modern Family Office?
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A Family Office is all about providing a tailored, bespoke experience to the family. How does a family office extend that into the digital world? Technology tools, when properly implemented, can provide the personalization needed to create a greater sensation of comfort and higher satisfaction for the family. The right offering can demonstrate the value-add a family office provides and add to the services the office can offer without increasing costs.
Managing Conflict: Triggers and Self-Tempering
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Randolph B. Godshall will speak from his experience as a respected litigator about family-conflict litigation and how to avoid such legal wrangles by working through differences in perspectives. Randolph will reference his extensive client work to identify proactive and preventative strategies and tactics to better understand the root causes. Ann Begler will build on Randolph’s foundation and explain the psychological underpinnings that impact individuals in different ways and how they contribute to inevitable family conflict.
Breakout Session 1: Family & Business History: A Gift to Future Generations of Your Family
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Andy Anderson and his team at Wells Fargo have found that wealthy families are interested in the details of their family histories, not so much to boast about their great business success or to impress their descendants, but to demonstrate that family wealth came with profound dedication, an immense amount of hard work, and often great sacrifice. In this session, Andy will share how weaving together the family story can spur emotional and psychological connections, inspire future generations, and lessen the “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations” effect.
Three Keys to Sustaining Family Wealth
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Parents often find it difficult to discuss their wealth with their children, especially when it comes to what will happen to their wealth when they die. But when parents do not clearly detail their intentions or prepare their children to receive the family’s wealth, they risk outcomes that will meaningfully erode the value of their estate. Fortunately for every family there are key steps—from opening the lines of communication early to considering the value of an impartial trustee—that can help with successfully transferring the family wealth from generation to generation.
When you think about family dynamics, very often there’s a lack of that home team concept and feeling of unity. Establishing that home team within your family early on offers the greatest opportunity for generational success and healthy family governance. The need to prepare the family for the future is particularly important for families that own and run a family business which they hope to pass down to future generations. A five-step process can help families build their home team advantage.
A family constitution—the rule book that defines the vision and principles of a family’s wealth strategy and acts as an operating model—should be as unique as the family itself. The key to developing an appropriate family constitution is not in the ultimate output, but in the collaborative process of developing it. In working together, families often uncover factors which bind them together. However, the process can also elicit confronting discussions about what really matters to individual members.
Like many families, you may be involved in running businesses or other types of investments together with other family members, but is this necessarily the right choice? Should you consider breaking away and creating your own path. The decision on whether to stick together or unbundle collective assets into separate ownership and investment structures will perhaps be one of the most difficult decisions a family will ever confront. There are advantages and disadvantages to both.