Family Wealth: — Keeping It in the Family — How Family Members and Their Advisers Preserve Human, Intellectual, and Financial Assets for Generations, Revised and Expanded Edition

Introduction

Thank you for honoring me by opening this book and taking the journey it offers. To begin a journey is an act of courage. I hope your courage will be rewarded by new ideas and practices that will enable your family to preserve its wealth long into the future. To those of you (pilgrims on the road to Compostella) who read the first edition of Family Wealth: Keeping It in the Family, welcome back to the journey seven years later. I hope your journey so far has been rewarding and that your family governance systems are functioning well. I also hope you will find the ideas on elders, ritual, practices, evaluation of the third generation, mentorship, and the role of the homme d'affaires, newly included in this revised edition, a way to see what I have learned since we parted. To all who are journeying with me, let me paraphrase what Chaucer says at the beginning of the Canterbury Tales: As we are all pilgrims journeying to Canterbury individually, why not walk together and tell each other our stories? This is my story of family, and I welcome your stories as they join mine.

Thirteen years ago, I found myself professionally in the same "dark wood" described by Dante in the introduction to The Inferno. For the prior twenty-three years I had been honored by the decisions of many families to use my professional skills as an attorney. Most of these families sincerely believed that I helped them, and for many of those early years, I thought so, too. Gradually, however, I came to ...