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| Building Your Family's 100 Year Plan: The Series |
100 Year Plan Part III: Give, and We Shall Receive
Brett Anderson
02/02/2004
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Their philanthropic disinterest may have contributed to the dissipation of wealth. The Vanderbilts’ curious chronicle illustrates what attorney and family counselor James E. Hughes Jr. (see "Growing a Great Family") describes as entropy—a gradual decline in vitality measured in terms of creativity, consciousness of the world and the family’s place in it, a sense of purpose and of stewardship toward succeeding generations, and the recognition that wealth does not exist independently of the society in which  it is generated. If we regard the complex of relationships, institutions, financial instruments and individuals that form the family enterprise as a kind of engine, then the addition of energy—time, talent, discipline, experience and money—is required to maintain it in working order from one generation to the next; without this fuel, it sputters to a halt. The Vanderbilts lived, figuratively and literally, off of their principle, both financial and intellectual.
Philanthropy
as Wealth Preservation
There are multiple reasons why this failure occurs," says Hughes. "But on a practical basis (and the world is a practical organ), no one will be good or useful in managing financial capital if they are not first thriving human beings and intellectually curious creatures. You don’t just get born with financial skills. The greater problem that causes families to disappear is that they don’t concentrate on creating thriving human beings in the next generation. They don’t create an intellectual community within the family that is based on learning, sharing the learning, and then making the learning useful to the whole family."
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