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| Building Your Family's 100 Year Plan: The Series |
100 Year Plan Part I: The Family Mission Statement
Brett Anderson & Thomas Kostigen
12/01/2003
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The stories of our families—the aggregate of ours and our predecessors’ experiences, knowledge, beliefs, and accomplishments—are the raw materials from which our own identities are hewn. The family mission statement is at once the expression of this identity and a means of fulfilling the common goals that will enable us, as a group, to prosper and learn. The term derives from the often-employed metaphor of the family as a business; yet the analogy continues to be a useful one, for the object of the family mission, in most cases, runs parallel to that of the well-managed enterprise: to organize our financial, intellectual, and human assets for the purpose of preserving and enhancing each of these in succeeding generations.
Bill Gates on Stewardship
"I am the steward of a share of society’s resources," says Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft Corp. "Eventually, I’ll return most of it as contributions to causes I believe in, such as education and population stability.... Giving away money effectively is almost as hard as earning it in the first place. I’m many years away from wanting to divert a lot of my attention in that direction—and I don’t want to presuppose today what my thinking will be then.... One thing is for sure. I won’t leave a lot of money to my heirs, because I don’t think it would be good for them. So my children...can dream of being rich. But if their dreams come true, it won’t be because dad gave them a lot of money." |
How our families accomplish this goal is predicated on our values and history—who we are. The process we follow will depend, too, on the stage our family is at in its development—its complexity, the number of generations represented, and their relationship to the businesses or structures that comprise our finances. A family with young children just starting out has as much need of a mission statement as a family five generations old, yet the missions themselves and methods for executing them will necessarily differ. A couple in their 30s with toddlers will elaborate their mission themselves, involving the children at different stages of participation; a very large extended family will require more formal processes to engage its members.
Amy Braden of the Family Wealth Center at JP Morgan Private Bank cites the example of the Mogis of Japan, whose family has owned Kikkoman since the 17th century. "This family has flourished for hundreds of years, not just 100," she says. "Their assets are very diversified at this point, and there are many, many family members and branches of the family. The more complex and larger the family and the assets become, the more the vision and mission come to be very simple. Three key principles the family keeps coming back to are peace within the family, prosperity for the family, and progress in the business."
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