Family Wealth Continuity: Building a Foundation for the Future (A Family Business Publication)

Most family business owners and wealth creators share an important vision: perpetuating family and wealth for many generations to come. To ensure wealth continuity, many families put into place various structures, plans, and processes, including estate plans (which may include multiple trusts), ownership succession plans, governance structures/strategies, and others.  These sometimes-elaborate plans are aimed at preserving family wealth.  In reality, for many families, they don’t.    In fact, it has been estimated  that a majority  of estate plans in place fail, largely as a result of family conflict or communication problems.  Author David Lansky reveals here that too many one-size-fits-all and elaborate continuity plans fail to take into account the idiosyncratic family factors that can interfere with continuity planning. Lansky details further how building the right foundation will help families implement the best continuity plans.  Addressing that foundation effectively includes understanding the building blocks that make it up, assessing their strengths, and developing strategies to improve them. The specific building blocks include:

• Learning Capacity 

• Familyness 

• Safe Communication Culture 

• Commitment to Personal Development

• Effective Leadership of Change

While richly informative, this book is not intended as a training manual, but rather as a starting point for important ideas and conversations. In fact, the goal of this book is to help families consider several related factors that go into a foundation for continuity, and to build more effective continuity plans and strategies based on their assessments.

David Lansky, Ph.D., a Principal Consultant with the Family Business Consulting Group, Inc. has played a key role in the growth and transformation of many enterprising families, and in the business interests which they share.

A clinical psychologist and family therapist by training, David spent over 15 years as a managing partner in a clinical psychology practice, where he observed the impact that personal relationships, family dynamics, and communication obstacles can have on families’ abilities to work, plan and live well together.  Today, his clients include entrepreneurial families and families of wealth, multigenerational families with shared business or financial interests, family offices and private trust companies, all of whom want to plan well for the future.

A graduate of Montreal’s McGill University, David obtained his Master’s and Doctoral degrees in clinical psychology from Rutgers University. He has served as clinical faculty member and supervisor at Northwestern University’s Family Institute and taught marital and family therapy at the Adler School of Professional Psychology in Chicago.

David is well known for his expertise in the psychology and family dynamics of multigenerational wealth having published widely on family business and family wealth, including articles in Private Wealth Magazine, Family Business Magazine, and The Family Business Advisor and  a regular column in The Journal of Practical Estate Planning.