Wealth of Wisdom

CHAPTER 11Benchmarking Your Family Against Successful Global Families

Dennis Jaffe

This assessment tool offers your family a “snapshot” to discover how much you engage in practices identified as important to sustaining your family enterprise across generations and using your family wealth to make a difference in people's lives. It focuses on best practices in three areas—the family, the family enterprise, and the human capital of the next generation.

These practices were developed in several research projects over the past decade.¹ By using this assessment with members of your family, and comparing your responses and perceptions, you can organize a productive family conversation for how to develop your family governance to respond to emerging challenges, inside the family and in the business environment.

This assessment explores and compares family members' perceptions of governance practices that span the interconnected worlds of family, business/finance, and personal development. A successful family enterprise experiences a degree of balance in all of these areas; it would not be seen as fully successful if any one of these areas were troubled. For example, if the business produces wealth but the family fragments, or young people grow up collectively unhappy, unproductive, and unfulfilled, then the family is not likely to view itself as successful. Successful families rely on best practices from each of these areas or pathways—family, business, and personal development.