Helping families with family businesses, family offices and family foundations overcome
intergenerational challenges of governance, succession, family teams and inheritance.
Tools and Resources
for Families and their Professional Advisors
If your family has substantial shared assets and faces a relationship, succession, leadership,
governance, or management challenge I can help you explore, design, and implement solutions.
I am a founding partner of Relative Solutions, the foremost
firm helping multi-generational families effectively manage the complexity of decisions relating to their shared assets.
Our unique approach focuses on the intersection of family dynamics with ownership, enterprise management, and leadership.
This perspective helps families understand the intricate ways in which they are joined together and to capitalize on their
strengths to positively address difficult choices within and throughout the generations.
In the next decade trillions of dollars will pass between generations. This legacy places an enormous responsibility on heirs
to this wealth and offers them enormous influence over many individual livlihoods, businesses, foundations, and society. I would like
to help them use their opportunities wisely and respond to the challenges in order to pass these same advantages to the
next generation.
Families must overcome certain pitfalls to achieve success across generations:
Within their businesses, as one generation succeeds another, they must make many choices about management, ownership,
and renewal.
In the family difficulties arise around communication, conflict, and differing goals and values.
Individuals face complex career choices, conflict with other family members, and the pressure of finding a path in life.
Current
Activities
Inherited and Acquired Wealth:
This fall has seen the publication of two articles, co-authored with James Grubman, Ph.D., that present our ideas about the ways that family wealth affects personal identity, and the pathways that people form wealth pursue to discover their life purpose. They can be downloaded from the articles section of the web site. Please send me your thoughts and reactions. These ideas have been picked up several times by the media, and I have been asked to speak at several private wealth forums. The issues seem to resonate with families who want to develop their human as well as their financial capital.
Acquirers and Inheritors Dilemma: Discovering Life Purpose and Achieving Personal Identity in the Presence of Wealth. Journal of Wealth Management.
Immigrants and Natives to Wealth: Understanding Clients Based on their Wealth Origins. Journal of Financial Planning.
We are preparing other articles on the role of professionals and wealth advisors in working with wealthy clients and their families.
With my colleagues, I am also working on a study of entitlement and how a family can move to develop attitudes and behaviors of stewardship in each generation.
A Winter as Thinker in Residence in South Australia:
This summer I spend the winter in S. Australia, working with the Premier and a coalition of government, education, business and wealth advisors to develop a long range set of policies, practices and skills to support the development of the next generation of family business. I was asked to come when the region began to see that their 50,000 small to large family businesses were facing a huge succession crisis, as there was a scarcity of young people to take the place of their elders. It was a huge shift for me-to be working not with a single client, but for a whole region of families. I met and worked with scores of wonderful, creative and visionary leaders. For nearly three months, I worked with several task forces-of professional advisors, young people, business owners, and government agencies, to develop ways to make the transition more effective. Our report is about to go to the cabinet, and then to press. I will have copies available electronically, and in monograph form, by the end of the year. I am also writing an article on my experiences.
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