Money is hardly ever ‘just money’: When business families discuss distributions or family member compensation, capital structure or investment strategy, these conversations are often driven by the individual family members’ emotions and orientations towards money and wealth.

Families differ in their willingness to integrate outsiders into their family circle. These actions influence the included or excluded individuals in different ways, creating a ripple effect throughout the family that can last generations.

This fictitious case study illustrates what happens when a family outgrows its family office, and offers suggestions for a way forward.

Family firms that fail to educate their owners are putting their future in peril. In this article, we highlight where business families fall short in their ownership training and outline a simple process to identify the educational needs of your own family shareholder group.

Once a family establishes family governance mechanisms, they rarely revisit their purpose or evaluate their success. The result is that family governance gets stuck focusing on the past and present and doesn’t keep an eye on the future. How well does your family governance meet todays’ demands, while supporting the family on its journey to where it wants to be 10 years from now?

How do you keep an enterprising family comprised of dozens, even hundreds of shareholders united and aligned? An effective family council can counteract the growing family’s tendencies to grow apart over time. However, as a family and its needs, wants, and objectives evolve – so should the family council that supports it.

Should you select family members for governance roles based on which family branch they belong to, or which generation? Should you choose them based on their qualifications, or based on how well-respected they are within the family? All of these choices come with benefits and disadvantages – in this short article, we attempt to disentangle them to provide business families with actionable advice.

Can you quantify your board’s contribution to the performance of your family business? What about its effect on the family, in terms of settling disputes, creating policies, and providing transparency, just to name a few?

What are the core elements of a successful and fulfilling career?

The salaries of top executives can be a hot topic and a source of stress – at family businesses and non-family firms. How can family business leaders decide what’s fair?

Should family members work outside the family business before joining? Experts have long recommended that this is the best (and only!) way - but does it make a difference, in the real world, to have the next generation work on the outside?

Successful, long-lasting business families have a family strategy: A shared understanding of what is important to them, what they want to do together, and how they want to work together to achieve their collective goals and vision.

Family businesses and the families that own them are known for their secrecy and discretion. This article lays out the most common taboos that arise in family businesses and describes strategies to diagnose and deal with them.

Our hope is that our book on single family offices (SFO) deepens the conversation in the field, challenges assumptions, and ultimately better serves SFO, their families and our communities.

The German Merck family has succeeded where many business families have failed: Keeping a group of over 300 family members unified, aligned and committed over the course of 350 years.