Robert's great-great grandfather was a homesteader in Texas when it still belonged to Mexico. The government granted him a choice spread of ranchland near the southern border. Robert’s great-grandfather, the oldest of four children who each inherited an equal portion of the property, was the only one to keep his bequest intact. In the grand Texas tradition, oil was discovered in the family backyard in the early 1930s and they grew rich.

The land remains the nucleus of the family business in the hands of members of the fifth generation. They raise 2,000 head of cattle, lease several large vacation homes that the second and third generations built on the ranch and manage the property’s oil and natural gas mining. Revenues from these concerns flow into trust funds that benefit each branch of the family, including the growing pool of heirs. The story could have taken a very different turn had Robert’s generation decided not to censure the idea of doing as so many Texas ranch families have done: selling acreage parcel by parcel to developers at highly enticing prices. 

A decade ago, the fate of the family business was still undetermined. As head of the family office, Robert—who asked that his last name not be used because his family has agreed not to discuss its commercial operations in the press—knew that profit might trump tradition for some of his siblings, cousins and second cousins: 17 of them altogether. In 1996, he called a family meeting and posed the question: Should they keep the land in one piece or divide it among the three main branches of the family, which could then make their own decisions? Members of the older generation had been adamant about their desire to keep the land in the family. Some had refused to attend the meeting. Those present held their breath.

The vote from the fourth generation was unanimous. They wanted to keep the land intact.

“That was a surprise and a relief,” recalls Robert, who is now 48 and one of the older members of his generation. “I think my father was afraid that the answer would be much different. There was a strong desire to not go down the path that so many ranching families had, which is to partition the land and let everyone do their own thing; the land loses its heritage value.” The family has among its possessions a trove of letters from Robert’s great-grandfather in which he wrote about his love for the land and his wish for the ranch to remain undivided.

Aside from the land and the letters, however, there was little else that united Robert’s generation. The business revenues, already spread ever-thinner with each new generation, were beginning to shrink as oil that once flowed freely became more difficult and more expensive to extract from the ground. By the time they arranged a family meeting in 1996, the arguments had grown contentious, and relationships between family members had become strained. The heirs were in sharp disagreement over the future direction of the family business and their individual roles in it, and were wrestling with thorny questions: Should they turn over the handling of their assets to a professional management company? Should they invest in other potential sources of revenue? Should they invest in new, experimental technologies to better locate and extract oil? Should the business remain, as it had always been, a corporation that distributed all of its profits to the heirs? Even leisure time was a source of conflict. Family members had always used a casual system for dividing access to the central ranch compound among the different family branches, but as the number of families wanting vacation time grew, disputes arose over the amount of time each family could spend at the old homestead.

Even more worrisome was the fact that the family was only loosely bound by a partnership that had to be renewed by majority vote every five years. At each juncture, a small faction of the family could negate a decision that had produced so much good feeling by voting against renewing the partnership, at which point the revenues and land could be fragmented. Because each heir owned his or her interest outright, the family could break up if someone refused to renew the agreement.