Stayin' aligned FEATURES

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

FAMILY ESSENTIAL: Applied Values

The Art of Possiblity

by by Rosamund Stone Zander & Benjamin Zander

The Zanders offer a set of 12 practices designed to help us consider new approaches in our everyday interactions with others. The practice of “Creating Frameworks for Possibility” asks us to start each interaction from a non-judgmental perspective, overcoming biases that develop when we focus only on the visible evidence we see before our eyes. When we consider our interaction with others in this way, we open ourselves up to new possibilities. The Art of Possibility is a collection of illustrations and guidance that takes “thinking outside the box” to the next level.

FAMILY ESSENTIAL: Applied Values

Building a Successful Family Business Board

by Jennifer M. Pendergast, John L. Ward and Stephanie Brun de Pontet

 

Family business owners are often resistant to setting up functioning boards of directors, but when they do, they often rank the decision as among the best decisions they’ve ever made–for the business and the family.  In this update of John Ward’s original book, Creating Effective Boards for Private Enterprises, the authors have added a couple of decades of experience to create a very readable, A-to-Z set of considerations for creating boards for family businesses.  The perspective on the value of boards presented goes well beyond the fiduciary basics, to the use of boards to support everything from strategy development and compensation to succession planning and owner conflict management.  Survey research reported lends support to the notion that the leap of faith family owners take in actually hiring a majority of non-family members to serve on the board turns out to return the most value across virtually every measure.