Everything published on this site.
Ten pages and every article, listed in full.
In full
Every page and every article
Pages
We build governance for family offices, and then we hold the year that keeps it alive.
Every family is somewhere on the same curve, and most do not know where.
The work is a year, and then it happens again.
The instrument the office runs on.
Answer five questions and see where you stand on the curve.
Writing on governance, for people who have to decide.
We ran a family office before we started advising them.
Tell us what you cannot currently answer.
What this covers.
What reading this site does and does not create.
What we are, and what we are not.
Insights
Why business-owning families govern better
Families that still own an operating company put formal governance in place more often than families that do not. The company is what taught them, and the lesson is available without one.
The seventy percent statistic is not evidence
Where the figure came from, what it actually counted, and the three questions that would tell a family where it really stands.
An investment policy statement is not governance
An IPS says what may be held. It does not say who may decide to hold it, on whose recommendation, or what happens when two owners disagree. Both documents are needed. Only one of them is governance.
Eighty-six percent have no succession plan for the people who decide
The succession most families have thought about is the shares. The one J.P. Morgan found missing is the people who run the place, and it is the one that stops an office within a week.
What a family council is for, and what it cannot do
Three bodies now sit around most family enterprises. Only one of them speaks for the family, and it is the one most often given a room, an agenda and no authority at all.
The succession paradox: agreement is not a plan
Deloitte Private asked three hundred family businesses about chief executive succession. Eighty-five percent call planning for it critical. Twenty-three percent are implementing a plan. What sits between the two is governance.
Five stages describing how much of an enterprise's governance would survive the absence of the person who built it, and how to tell honestly which one you are in.
Succession is a governance problem before it is a tax problem
Ownership transfers on a date certain. The ability to govern does not transfer at all unless somebody built the architecture that carries it.
Who decides what in a family office?
The decision rights matrix, what belongs in it, the four bodies authority usually sits with, and the test that reveals whether a family actually has one.
What is family office governance?
A definition that can be acted on, the four things governance actually consists of, and the distinction between governance and the investment management it is constantly confused with.