Читать книгу Family Capital - Curtis Gregory - Страница 4

Of course, client confidentiality prevents me from literally reproducing the discussions between families and advisors. So, instead, I've created a fictitious American family – the Titan family. We learn who this family is and how they made their money. We watch as, over the years and across the generations, the family and its advisors grapple with the many challenges involved in managing great wealth. Sometimes the family succeeds and sometimes they fail. Sometimes their advisors do a terrific job and sometimes they let the family down.

Throughout, I don't tell you what happened, I show you what happened. We actually listen in on the meetings the various family members have with their advisors. Some of the conversations are almost verbatim from meetings I've had with my own clients. Others are reproduced based on reports of meetings my partners have had with families they work with. When I'm not reporting conversations exactly as they occurred, it's mainly due either to lapse of memory or to the need to maintain client confidentiality. (I'm quite sure that some of my clients will recognize themselves in these pages, though I hope no one else recognizes them.)

Finally, in some cases I've invented conversations out of whole cloth in order to make a point that seemed important. Even in these cases, I've tried to organize the conversation and the dialogue so that they sound as realistic as possible.

When the Titan family members speak, I've tried to make them speak like real people. They sometimes get things right and they sometimes don't. They lose their patience and they keep their cool. They have individual personalities, and those personalities affect the way they think.

I've tried to make the meetings as realistic as possible, too. Sometimes the family and its advisors stick to their agendas and sometimes they don't. Some of these detours are simply timewasters (I've eliminated most of those), but most are very much the opposite. I've tried to make the point repeatedly that when an agenda is hijacked by the family, it's almost always for a good reason. They are departing from the set agenda because something is on their minds and the advisors in the room need to address that topic.

The net result is that this book may seem to the reader more like a novel – one with a lot of dialogue – or a screenplay than a traditional investment book. Let's face it – investment books can be terminally dry. Trying to tell people how to invest their capital doesn't result in the most riveting prose. I hope that by transcribing dialogue as it actually happened, some of this dreariness will be dissipated and readers will recognize themselves and their families in the conversations.