Helping families with family businesses, family offices and family foundations
overcome intergenerational challenges of governance, succession, family teams and inheritance

Resources for Family Enterprise Governance & Leadership Across Generations

Succeeding over generations as a family with one or more family businesses, or significant shared wealth, is an incredible challenge that few families are able to manage. Over nearly 40 years, Dennis Jaffe has worked with such families, and developed tools and resources to help them and their advisors meet this test. This web site contains articles, tools and resources and describes programs and consultation that can help a wealthy or business family move between generations, and sustain their personal relationships, build their shared family enterprises, increase their family “capital,” and  develop new leadership across generations.

My colleague Jim Grubman and I have created a web site that contains resources for family wealth advisers: Family Wealth Advisor Training

 

Advising the “Enterprising” 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.

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.

Current Activities

Invitation to Families to Participate in Best Practices Research

Best Practices for the Multigenerational Family Enterprise

Are you doing everything that you can to sustain your family and your wealth?

Industry research suggests that families who have sustained family harmony and wealth across the generations have done so by relying on 15 key practices related to nurturing the family, stewarding the family enterprises and cultivating the next generation.

Family Office Exchange has partnered with Dennis Jaffe, Ph.D., a renowned family business advisor, to conduct research to determine how prevalent these practices are today in multigenerational families around the world and to understand the commitment that families have to using these practices in the future.

 

Invitation to Participate
We are pleased to invite you to participate in this brief, yet powerful research study. The survey takes just minutes to complete and offers you the opportunity to reflect on your own family roadmap by asking where you are today and where you want to be in the future.

 

What You Will Learn
In exchange for completing the questionnaire, you will receive a summary of the research findings.

  • Your survey results provide an immediate “snapshot” of the degree to which you engage in practices that have been identified by leaders in the field as important for sustaining your family, your family enterprise and the human capital of your family members.
  • The research findings offer a look inside multigenerational families around the world and allow you to understand how your family compares to your peers.
  • You can use the survey questionnaire to measure your family’s perceptions of its greatest strengths, as well as how it can grow, develop and prepare for the succession of the next generation.

Strictly Confidential
All of your information is strictly confidential and will only be shared in aggregate. No individual survey responses will be shared in any manner.

 

How to Participate
Please click this
link to complete the online survey. 

If you have questions about this research, please email me at djaffe@saybrook.edu.

Working With Family Dynamics: Becoming an Effective Family Advisor

My colleague Jim Grubman and I, working with Northwood University, offer an  intensive two-day hands-on, experiential workshop for financial, legal, and business advisors who want to enhance their work with the highest levels of multi-generational families of wealth.

This program will be offered several times a year in different locations, and will expand to include on-line and more advanced programs. After our successful launch of Cohort I in Dallas, we are planning our schedule of workshops for the coming year.

For Further Information Click here

Developing Transformational Leadership in the Family Enterprise

I have been working with the Family Business Network—Pacific Asia region, to develop a year-long intensive set of modules that build a learning community of next generation leaders who develop the personal, family and organizational skills to make a difference in their family enterprises. We have developed four programs that are conducted several times a year.These programs can also be conducted in other places.
Contact me for further information.

Tools and Resources

The Values Edge

The Values Edge employs Values Cards to help an individual, couple, family or team to define their Personal Values Pyramid, and then work together to create a Family or Team Values Statement.

Each kit includes a deck of values cards, along with colored post-it stickers for transferring values to a Display Card that preserves your Values Pyramid in a visible format that can be worn as a name card. By sharing personal values arranged in colorful pyramids, people in a family or a work team can easily experience their similarities and differences.


To Order
Click Here

Family Enterprise Competency Map

This new 50-question on-line learning tool allows each family member to respond to questions about family relationships and business-financial arrangements to create a shared picture of the family enterprise. It can be used by a family on their own, or with their family advisor, as they create cross-generational governance.
Contact me for further information.

Dennis T.Jaffe PH.D

Developing Responsible Leadership Across Generations in Family Enterprise

about me
CLICK HERE

Coming Up

Family Dynamics Workshop for Family Advisors.
Working on 2012 schedule,
Sustainability for Family Enterprise.
Hong Kong,
Dec.06.