If your family has many shared assets you may need help to deal with multiple challenges such as:

• Organizing the family to manage its enterprises and make good decisions,
• Defining your shared goals, values and vision and creating agreement to pursue them together,
• Finding ways to sustain family connection over multiple generations, and
• Creating programs to support the development of responsible adults for the next generation.

Many families today decide to convene a family meeting, or create a family council, to deal with the challenges related to sustaining their family enterprises across generations. My work with families involves helping family members work together, with the help of their professional advisors, to engage their most difficult issues, and come up with their own solutions. By convening family work sessions, family members can face the tough questions, listen to each other, and crystallize their unique values, principles and guidelines that move them toward agreement and an action plan for their family enterprise, and for their family.

I guide the family to create a safe setting to convene, and move productively toward creating unique understandings, agreements, structures and processes that enable them to sustain themselves across generations. I also help the family organize their stewardship to sustain the family business and other family enterprises, and develop leadership within their next generation, so that the wealth and success that they have already achieved can be sustained by their heirs.

Current Projects and Activities The Values Edge: A Resource to Help Families Define their Individual and Shared Values As a foundation for their work, I have created a deck of values cards, and stickers and display cards that can be used to create personal values pyramid, which can be shared in a family meeting. With the cards I offer a guide for facilitating a family meeting to define individual, and then to work together as a family to define shared values for the family. This learning package has been used by many families, and has been adopted for use by several financial advisors, to help families understand the values that lie at the foundation of their legacy. To learn more and to order the Values Edge, click here. Working Papers on Family Enterprise and Governance Many families have asked for a clear guide that explains family governance, and how it can be developed. To help families and their professional advisors, I have developed a working paper that provides a clear introduction to this difficult set of practices. I also offer a second working paper on the issue of creating an independent board to help guide the family as one or a group of profitable enterprises. We are currently working on a third working paper, on how to prepare the family for the sale of the legacy family business. You are welcome to read and use these working papers. I look forward to hearing your feedback and questions. Family Governance Working Paper Independent Board Working Paper Entitlement and Stewardship Families are concerned about how to raise their children to overcome a sense of entitlement, and to teach an attitude and practices of stewardship to their next generation. My colleague Fredda Herz Brown and I have written several articles on this, including From Entitlement to Stewardship: How a Prosperous Family Can Prepare the Next Generation, which was recently published in the Journal of Wealth Management. We welcome your comments and feedback, as we prepare additional articles on this complex topic. Entitlement and Stewardship Article Women and Wealth Research Study We are proud to announce the publication of our research study, The New Wealth Paradigm: How affluent women are taking control of their futures, by Campden Press. For the study, we interviewed 40 women about their experience with money and wealth growing up, in their families and with their children. The results offer a picture of how women have a strikingly different perspective and attitude about family wealth than their male counterparts. For Information about Women and Wealth research, please visit CampdenConferences.com