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| Building Your Family's 100 Year Plan: The Series |
100 Year Plan Introduction: Making Meaning of Wealth Across Generations
Brett Anderson
12/01/2003
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Family giving also inculcates in individuals a sense of obligation to ideas and projects larger than themselves. Not only does it prompt them outside the circle of their own concerns by identifying worthwhile causes, but it asks them to apply their own abilities to solving problems. The benefits of philanthropy to the family concern at large are twofold: First, the experience advances the notion of the mission statement as a living, rather than static, document that can be applied to real situations; second, it fortifies in each of us the chief principle that drives the entire plan for wealth transfer and preservation: giving back a portion (if not more) of what we have gained.
Successful Succession
W.R. Hearst’s decision to place the Hearst Corp. into a family trust, rather than to hand it over outright to his five sons, proved a wise strategy. Hearst may have fallen short in the interpersonal aspects of creating a 100-year plan, but when it came to the future of the family business, he exercised a shrewd economy, ensuring the family’s oversight and involvement in the trust, while at the same time introducing essential talents from outside his family.
| "Once wealth reaches a critical level, families are no longer thinking about success as truly being financial." |
The fourth entity the 100-year plan must address, the family enterprise, is often the most sensitive. Whether an enterprise exists as a business, group of businesses, or as a portfolio of diversified assets, succession of leadership lies at the very core of preservation. If our mission is to develop the potential of our family members, then this is, in part at least, to foster the next generation of leaders. The danger for leaders of the current generation, of course, is to impose their will on the next. Leadership must evolve from personal initiative and commitment—and it must have the support of the members.
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