Family Wealth--Keeping It in the Family: How Family Members and Their Advisers Preserve Human, Intellectual, and Financial Assets for Generations

The landmark book that changed the way exceptional familiesthink about their heritage, their wealth, and their legacy tofuture generations--now revised and expanded.

Every family, looking at the next generation, hopes to conferadvantages that are more than just material and financial--toinculcate character and leadership, to inspire creativity andenterprise, to help all family members find and follow theirindividual callings, and to avoid the financial dependency and lossof initiative that can all too often be an unwanted consequence offinancial success. Yet many families never succeed in realizingthat vision, much less sustaining it for three, four, or fivegenerations and beyond.

James Hughes has thought deeply about these challenges, and hisinsights are at once practical and profound. For more than threedecades, he has personally guided multiple generations of familiesin creating strategies to preserve their human and intellectualcapital as well as their financial assets. His teachings synthesizeinsights from psychology, anthropology, political history,philosophy, economic theory, and the law, with examples rangingfrom Aristotle to cutting-edge social science theory. His ideashave been taken up by numerous exceptional families, by theiradvisers, and by scores of authors, practitioners, and academicswho have found value in the methods he pioneered.

The first edition of this book, privately published, became aword-of-mouth classic. Now, Hughes has updated and substantiallyexpanded it with new chapters that challenge conventional notionsof wealth and offer guidelines for conserving family assets in thebroadest senses. Filled with tested principles and practices forfamily governance and joint decision making, it is a rich source ofworkable wisdom that family members can put into practice today, tothe enduring benefit and gratitude of future generations.