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 established, family governance mechanisms are rarely revisited or evaluated. The result is that family governance gets stuck focusing on the past and present - instead of supporting your family on its journey to where it wants to be.

How do you keep a shareholder group of dozens, even hundreds of shareholders united and aligned? Family councils can counteract the growing family’s tendencies to grow apart - but they must evolve alongside the family’s changing needs, wants, and objectives.

Should you select family members for governance roles based on family branch or generation, their qualifications, or based on how well-respected they are within the family? Every choice comes with benefits and disadvantages.

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.

There is little empirical evidence to support the widely held claim that the next generation of family business leaders benefit from working outside the family enterprise.

Welcoming a new spouse or committed life partner into a business owning family is a critical but often over looked aspect of Family Business continuity.

Every leader I coach struggles to find more white space - the time energy and space to reflect, to process, and to be available to what feelings and thoughts are beyond the immediate - in their life.

Imagine your family has just come into a great deal of (liquid) Read about the four big considerations that we think of as the guardrails of starting a family office.

You've just walked out of an estate planning meeting, your next meeting is to review new cybersecurity threats, and suddenly you get a call from a family member. Feeling overwhelmed yet?

Why do we, as humans, tend to minimize real threats, and what can family businesses do to appropriately prepare for existential hazards?

The unprecedented uncertainty in our world has made it more imperative that family enterprises commit to an ongoing practice to develop their capacity and their agility.

“[Philanthropy] brings the family members together in an area of engagement that brings out the best in us where we can contribute for the benefit of others and that is not limited to the business.”