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CHAPTER 3 Principles

Now that you have read this far, you understand that complete family wealth goes far beyond money: it is the family's well-being, as encompassed by its qualitative capital—human, legacy, family relationship, structural, and social—and supported by its quantitative, financial capital. You know that flourishing families define themselves not by blood but by affinity and engage in a variety of practices to grow their qualitative and quantitative capital over time. You have seen that family enterprises recognize that management is just one circle of their concern, linked with responsible ownership and family connectedness over generations.

These ideas are the foundation for the rest of this book, in which we explore the who and the how of the journey of complete family wealth. At this point, as a tool to memory, here is a modified version of a table that Jay created over 20 years ago, one that many families have found useful to post in their boardrooms or at the head of their most important governance documents.

PRINCIPLES OF COMPLETE FAMILY WEALTH

1 Preservation of complete family wealth is a question of human behavior.

2 The most fundamental assets of a family are its individual members.

3 The complete wealth of a family includes the human, legacy, family relationship, structural, and social capital of its members. The family's financial capital is a tool to support the growth of its qualitative capital.

4 To preserve its complete wealth successfully, a family must form a social compact among its members that reflects its shared values, and each generation must reaffirm and readopt that social compact.

5 To preserve its complete wealth successfully, a family must agree to create a system of representative governance through which it actively practices its values. Each generation must reaffirm its participation in that system of governance.

6 The mission of family governance must be the enhancement of the pursuit of happiness of each individual family member. This pursuit will enhance the whole family and further the long-term preservation of the family's complete wealth: its qualitative as well as financial capital.