Stayin' aligned FEATURES

eLign

Seven Realities for Affluent Family Leadership

by Greg Rogers with Kelly Costigan

Extended family complexity, entitlement, digital insecurity, the democratization and diversification of society, leadership issues, living longer and a challenging economic picture — all of these conditions are sure to impinge on you and your family unless you decide to act in advance.  Recognizing these realities is, in fact, a first step toward fashioning an entirely new reality that supports multi-generational well-being.

Read this eLign

The Real Work of Collaboration: Are We Kidding Ourselves?

by Scott Budge, PhD and Gregory T. Rogers with Brian Douglass

This eLign identifies real challenges of collaboration in wealth management and sets this within a context of group dynamics that may be at work within the family and advisory team. As a whole, collaboration often seems like a singularly useful concept but is in fact far more difficult to execute in reality. It is not something that happens organically, instead it is a deliberate and thoughtful endeavor with substantial opportunities for value creation in and among family-advisory systems.

Read this eLign

Facilitating Alignment in Complex Family and Advisory Systems

by Gregory Rogers and Scott Budge, PhD

Alignment describes the extent to which a family and its advisors - comprising a "system" with family and non-family expertise - work together to advance a family’s goals. In this context, alignment is essential given even more complex multi-generational family needs, and demand for integrated wealth management services. A facilitation process that considers emotional, resource and relationship alignment dimensions is now requisite to design and manage family-specific wealth advisory processes and resources.

Read this eLign

New Implications for Financial Decision-Making in Families

by Scott Budge, PhD and Gregory T. Rogers

This article highlights new effects on financial decision-making in families.  These are interesting times and will stress test families at every level of the economic spectrum.  Many will experience some form of hardship, loss or deprivation.  But make no mistake: many families will also emerge stronger and more vital than ever before.  A combination of good financial information and a no-nonsense approach to the emotional subtexts that are part of financial decision-making, will help to steady families who are tacking into those turbulent headwinds.

Read this eLign

The Financially Empowered Woman - Family Effects

by Gregory T. Rogers with Kelly Costigan

This eLign examines the financial empowerment of American women over the past 40 years as a unique historical and cultural phenomenon. In order to better understand this phenomenon, we thought it would be useful to examine the evolution of the factors that have given rise to it. Through this lens, we hope not only to offer a perspective on what will guide women’s financial decision-making for present and succeeding generations, but also to examine the effect of women’s newfound balance of power on family relationships. 

Read this eLign

We're reading

FAMILY ESSENTIAL: Applied Values

Currency Wars

by Carl Rickards

Currencies are one of the core components of global economics, yet also one of the least understood. As a mechanism to support high employment, the value of a given currency is an important tool toward social stability. During difficult times, a lower currency valuation cheapens exports to generate GDP growth. Yet when all countries are counting on exports to support growth and local social stability, the race is on for a lower currency value. This book examines the fragility and instability of the global economic system, and the “currency war” that is currently underway. The case is illustrated through historical precedent, presenting significant economic policy and national security implications.

FAMILY ESSENTIAL: Applied Values

Easy Economics

by Leonard Wolfe

Easy Economics: A Visual Guide to What You Need to Know, written by Leonard Wolfe (Greg Rogers’ Uncle) with Lee Smith and Stephen Buckles is an engaging guide on the subject of economics as well as a compilation of frequently asked questions and answers. The book cleverly combines illustrations with its text in order to create a consumable format for all audiences, and while “reading this book won’t make you a candidate for a Nobel Prize,” “it will make you more comfortable with many of the ideas that underlie today’s important economic issues”.

FAMILY ESSENTIAL: Leadership & Decision-making

Predictably Irrational

by Dan Ariely

Dan Ariely opened his eyes to what makes human beings tick based on personal experience as a burn victim. He became motivated to get his doctorate in both cognitive neurobiology and business administration to study the subject of decision-making, expanding on some of the key findings from behavioral finance such as loss aversion, anchoring and endowment effect. The book highlights experiment after experiment, and case study after case study, demonstrating that people are not only irrational thinkers, but predictably irrational.  

FAMILY ESSENTIAL: Leadership & Decision-making

Moneyball

by Michael Lewis

Selecting human resources for any endeavor is challenging at best, particularly when you have a hiring budget that is one-third of your leading competitor. Oakland A’s General Manager, Billie Bean, endeavored to change the recruiting and qualification process for building a professional baseball team. Traditional evaluation priorities such as “he looks confident” and “what a great swing” went out the door, and were replaced by statistical measures related to creating runs, since that is what is required to win games. And for one season, it seemed to work. As wealth stewards, we are all in the same game due to our attempt to build a roster of advisors that can deliver on our own given definition of success. Trying to determine the qualifications for future achievement makes it just as hard for the rest of us as it is for Billie and all of his professional sports peers.