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Five ways to preserve family wealth – and unity

5. Inspire individual family members to participate for their own reasons and start now

Haraz N. Ghanbari/AP/File
Penny Pritzker, chairman of Pritzker Realty Group and daughter of the cofounder of Hyatt hotels, talks with Education Secretary Arne Duncan at a White House event last month. Ms. Pritzker, along with her cousins Tom and Nick, were sued for fraud by other family members, which resulted in a 2005 settlement and the family fortune being split 11 ways.

  • By Ryan Zeeb and Todd Rhine Contributors

Individual family members must be prepared to receive their emotional as well as their financial inheritance.  Furthermore, each person must decide, for his or her own reasons, to participate in the kinds of family events and activities described here. We call this decision making process the “Is it worth it? Can I do it?” conversation.

In our experience, we have found it will be "worth it" to individual family members only if the family truly values each individual voice. It also helps when the family supports all members to find a meaningful and productive role within the family structure for the expression of their core passions. Of course, for some it may be worth it if there is enough money at stake to compel them to participate.

Successful families work on sustaining their family and wealth now. They don’t wait until they have a perfect plan, more free time, or resolved conflicts. They make a commitment and start, knowing that success will happen with an evolving and dynamic process. No family is perfect, and none succeeds without setbacks. The key is to start, and keep moving toward your vision. 

– Ryan Zeeb and Todd Rhine are members of the The GenUs Collaborative, an elite group of professionals with The Heritage Institute, which has spent more than two decades researching and helping to create successful multigenerational families.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

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The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

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