Borrowed from Your Grandchildren

CHAPTER 2Creating a Great Family: The Virtuous Circle of Family and Business

The generative family is a unique institution. It represents the successful interconnection of two different social systems—a family and a business. And both institutions, family and business, are in continual motion, as they expand and become more complex over generations. Almost all family enterprises stumble as they seek to remain together as family and business. They fragment as parts of the family go their own ways and as businesses rise and fall. The generative family is able to ride these waves and remain together over generations while so many of its peers are not.

Generative families enjoy great financial resources (the median in this study was $700 million). Collectively, they control resources well in excess of $100 billion—or roughly the annual GDP of a small country. But they have come to view their true wealth more broadly than simply financial.

This study probes the nature of their success. That success consists of developing the ability to take the positive aspects of family—personal relationships looking to their long-term future—and melding them to create effective business and family wealth. The generative family is a complex and multifaceted organization that builds and sustains both a huge family and a huge business/financial entity. Both family and business must be designed for different purposes but also to interact and work together. The generative family enterprise has built ...