The Voice of the Rising Generation E-Book

James E. Hughes

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Serie: Bloomberg
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 204

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Avoid "Shirtsleeves to Shirtsleeves" by Finding Your Voice Growing up in a family with significant wealth or a family business can often feel like an exercise in silence. What should you ask? Whom should you ask? When? Is it ever right to talk about such things? The Voice of the Rising Generation speaks directly to those who find themselves living in that silence, the so-called "next generation." Great wealth or a family business can act like a "black hole," sapping the dreams and aspirations of future generations who feel that they can never measure up to the fortune's founder. This book, written by a psychologist, an educator, and a wise counselor who single-handedly changed the landscape of family wealth, diagnoses with economy and precision the cause of entitlement and dependency. It is not too much money or too few chores. It is the failure of rising generations to individuate, that is, to pursue their dreams, develop their resilience, and find their voice. Many books are addressed to parents and grandparents who worry about the effects of wealth on their descendants. Almost alone in the field, this book speaks directly to 20-, 30- and 40-somethings, encouraging them--literally, giving them courage--to meet the challenge of integrating wealth's power into their lives, rather than disappearing into the black hole. Readers will: * Come to understand the true causes of entitlement and dependency * Identify the psychological characteristics of the rising generation and the challenges proper to its development * Clarify their own dreams, work, and vocation * Navigate personal relationships and communication within the context of wealth * Recognize the special challenges faced when rising is delayed until mid-life. If you are a young person who is starting your life's journey and wondering about the effects of parental gifts, trusts, or a family business, this book will offer you questions, reflections, and lessons-learned to help you find your own way. If you are a parent, grandparent, elder, or mentor, The Voice of the Rising Generation can serve the young people in your life as a gift more precious than gold.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Series Page

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

A Well-Known Family

The Challenge

The Journey

Our Approach

Aids to Navigation

Notes

Chapter 1: Setting Sail

The Black Hole

Talking about Silence

Testing the Boundary

Mentor

Notes

Chapter 2: Rosy-Fingered Dawn

Awakening

Rising

Slings and Arrows

Notes

Chapter 3: Self-Knowledge

The Center

Internal and External

The Balance Sheet

Notes

Chapter 4: Facing the Waves

Getting Away

Taking the Leap

Work

Relationships

Communication

Leaving Ithaca

Notes

Chapter 5: The Middle Passage

The Island of the Lotus-Eaters

The Middle Passage

A Forceful Hand

Self-Advocacy

Ownership

Leadership

Parenting in the Middle Passage

Questions for Rising on Your Own

Notes

Conclusion

Another Well-Known Family

Our Journey Thus Far

Searching for Elders

Returning to Mentor

Flying Away

Notes

Appendix

Questions for Reflection from the End of the Chapters

Additional Tools

Possible Educational Pathways

About the Authors

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Tables

Table 2.1

Table 2.2

Table 3.1

Table 3.2

List of Illustrations

Figure C.1

Figure 1.1

Figure 1.2

Figure 1.3

Figure 3.1

Figure 3.2

Figure 3.3

Figure 3.4

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

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Begin Reading

Chapter 1

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Since 1996, Bloomberg Press has published books for financial professionals, as well as books of general interest in investing, economics, current affairs, and policy affecting investors and business people. Titles are written by well-known practitioners, BLOOMBERG NEWS® reporters and columnists, and other leading authorities and journalists. Bloomberg Press books have been translated into more than 20 languages.

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The Voice of the Rising Generation

Family Wealth and Wisdom

James E. Hughes Jr.

Susan E. Massenzio

Keith Whitaker

Cover Design: Wiley

Cover Photograph: Paper © iStock.com/peter zelei; La Primavera by Sandro Botticelli, tempera on wood, 1481, detail © SuperStock/GettyImages

Copyright © 2014 by James E. Hughes Jr., Susan E. Massenzio, and Keith Whitaker. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

ISBN 978-1-118-93651-1 (Hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-118-93653-5 (ePDF)

ISBN 978-1-118-93652-8 (ePub)

Dedication

To my Rising Generation: Ellen, John, Natalie, Matt, Will, Alyssa, Ned, Catherine, Nancy-Elizabeth, and Chris; to the Next: Meg, Linnea, Sydney, Merrill, Miles, Ford, Jack, Thomas, Will, and Nadia; and to Jacqueline Merrill, who put her arm through mine.

—Jay Hughes

To Jonathan, John, Christopher, David, and Matthew—may you live lives full of health, happiness, and love.

—Susan Massenzio

To Kate, Dylan, Mary, Charli, Luke, Matt, Tristan, Cole, and Julia—may your journeys be “full of adventure, full of learning.”

—Keith Whitaker

To Anne D'Andrea, the fourth author of this book: Without your support of our collaboration, this book would never have arisen. Thank you.

—From all of us

Grow up, then, my Telemachus, grow strong. . . .Your dreams, my Telemachus, are blameless.

“Odysseus to Telemachus”

—Joseph Brodsky

Preface

Before you set out on a journey, it is always a good idea to have some idea of where you have come from and where you are going.

We three authors come from sharing the joy of writing a previous book, The Cycle of the Gift: Family Wealth and Wisdom (Bloomberg, 2013). That book was directed primarily to givers within families with wealth, inviting them to a process of self-reflection and self-understanding. One of its clearest messages was that all of us within the world of family wealth—wealth creators, spouses, siblings, and advisers—need to attend much more closely to the recipients of these gifts, to their dreams, their development, and their resilience.

The reception of The Cycle of the Gift only added to the pleasure we felt in writing it. One participant in a meeting we convened in New England expressed what we had hoped would come from that book better than we ever could: “I received a copy of it as a gift from my adviser,” he said. “I read it, and I immediately gave a copy to my mother.” He went on: “Once she had read it, she sent copies to my three siblings. Reading it prompted a wonderful family meeting, such as we had never had before.” Besides gratifying our all-too-human authorial egos, this response showed the cycle of the gift in action. It captured our dream that our book would bring families together to give and receive true gifts of spirit and not just transfers.

Still, while emphasizing the need to understand recipients, The Cycle of the Gift was addressed primarily to givers, parents, and grandparents. In it, we speak about recipients, generally younger members of families, but we do not truly speak to or with those younger family members. The present book aims to take that next step.

What holds these two books together is their shared focus on the core concept of human capital. This is a focus heralded in Jay Hughes's Family Wealth (Bloomberg, 2004 [1997]), as far back as its first edition, which was published two decades ago. It is a simple point, but, like most simple points, it bears repeating. Family after family whom we know focus their efforts, attention, and communications on only one of the five sources of capital available to them—their financial capital. Their human capital, which is itself the foundation of their intellectual, social, and spiritual capitals, largely goes neglected. And yet if we know anything in the field of family wealth, we know that the neglect of human capital is the ultimate cause of the dissipation of financial capital and the dissolution of families. Conversely, the cultivation of human capital strengthens family bonds and supports the preservation and growth of financial capital (not to mention intellectual, social, and spiritual capital). The Cycle of the Gift and The Voice of the Rising Generation explore and implement these basic truths. We hope that their ideas and practices benefit your family as much as they have benefited the many families from whom we have learned so much.

Acknowledgments

As authors, we would like to acknowledge our colleagues, clients, friends, and family members with whom we have discussed the challenges of the rising generation and from whom we have learned so much. Also, we would like to give special acknowledgment to Reta Haynes, the Haynes Family Foundation, and the Hemera Foundation for their generous support of our research and writing. Any insights found herein are the shared bounty of our friends; any infelicities are our own.

Introduction

A Well-Known Family

There once was a young man with a very successful father. His father came from a prominent family, but by his own industry and wits he, the father, had risen to become one of the most famous leaders of his time.

As a result, the young man, his son, grew up revering his father's name but not really knowing him as a person. As he became a young adult, he felt unsure of himself. He doubted whether he could ever accomplish much in the world, especially when compared with his father.

Luckily for this family, the young man's mother—who endured years of loneliness, far from her ambitious husband—remained a rock of constancy. And both the son and the father undertook long personal journeys to overcome their distance from each other. After many toils, the father returned home and repaired his marriage. The son underwent his own struggles, and when he at last reunited with his father, he did so both as a son and as a man of his own.

This is not the story of one of the many families with whom we have worked over the years—though, with a few changes here and there, it could apply to quite a few of them. It is the story of The Odyssey, the epic poem composed by Homer almost 3,000 years ago. The Odyssey recounts the wanderings of the hero Odysseus as he struggles to return home to the island of Ithaca from the battlefield of Troy. It also tells of the struggles of Odysseus's son Telemachus, who leaves home and goes on a quest to find his father and himself. All along, Penelope, Odysseus's wife and Telemachus's mother, endures a siege of unwelcome suitors, hoping against hope for the return of her husband and son.

The Challenge

Though Odysseus is a king and his family possesses great resources, The Odyssey is not primarily a story about wealth. It is a story of the human condition, and as such it speaks directly to the challenges faced by families with wealth and without it. It speaks especially to the challenge of the rising generation.

After years of consulting and research, we believe that we have some insight into the central challenge facing families with wealth. It is not a matter of finance. It is not a legal problem. It is not something to be resolved through the application of more, better, or faster resources. It is a human challenge, the challenge of overcoming the silence and finding the voice of the family's rising generation.

We will have much more to say about what we mean by “silence” and “the rising generation.” But, in the spirit of giving voice to the rising generation, we would like to begin by sharing words that we have heard from young family members themselves, in talks we have given to groups of families or in family meetings we have facilitated, words similar to these:

“I'm grateful for all my parents have done, but I sometimes feel that everything is done for me. I don't really have a voice. How can I find my own way and grow to be a happy, independent, man (or woman) of my own?”

“I've started on my own path, but I also find myself being pulled back home through all sorts of financial or business arrangements. What are ways to keep to my own course and still remain connected with my parents and larger family?”

“Everyone tells me to pursue my dreams. But I'm not sure what those are. I also don't know how to ask my parents about what resources I can draw on to figure out my way. Where do I start?”

Sometimes these words are very difficult for members of the rising generation to utter. At least these particular examples were spoken. In many families, in contrast, we find a deafening silence. The unspoken words of the rising generation are like Eduard Munch's The Scream: in our faces yet unheard.

Sometimes people think that the challenge of fostering the voice of the rising generation belongs solely to parents. Or it may be tempting to think that it lies squarely on the shoulders of members of the rising generation themselves. But this challenge does not belong just to parents or just to children. The Odyssey is not a story just of Odysseus's return home, nor is it a tale just of Telemachus's struggles to leave home. The rising generation needs those who have risen, and the risen need the rising.

The Journey

The goal of this book is simple: to engage in a conversation primarily with members of the rising generation, a conversation aimed at helping you meet this central challenge of growing and not losing your voice. Here is our plan:

Chapter 1 will squarely confront the main obstacle to the rising generation's finding its voice. The obstacle is, paradoxically, the great dream of the founder, which often turns into a black hole. In too many cases, this black hole absorbs the dreams of the individuals who came after the founder, leaving them at best to use their lives to steward somebody else's dream. This path diminishes the self, silences the future, and ultimately saps the family's vitality. It is the true cause of dependency, entitlement, and the power of the proverb “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves (or rice paddy to rice paddy) in three generations.”

With this obstacle in mind, Chapter 2 discusses what we mean by a rising generation. Our goal is to help you, members of the rising generation, recognize yourselves, apart from the distorting influence of the black hole. We will discuss the characteristics of members of any rising generation. We will explore the need for members of the rising generation to explore or struggle in order to grow. And we will touch upon the general challenges that members of rising generations face, with or without wealth.

Chapter 3 moves the conversation from the challenges that members of the rising generation face to strategies for dealing with those challenges. It will offer ways that you, members of rising generations, can come to know yourselves better, in particular your strengths, your beliefs, and your internal hurdles. We also share an updated version of our “Individual & Family Balance Sheet” as a tool for charting progress in this journey of self-understanding.

Chapter 4 takes the step from gaining self-knowledge to developing resilience and independence. Many parents focus primarily on financial literacy as a necessary skill for members of the rising generation. We ask young family members to reflect on what you think that you will need most to find your voice. Following Freud's emphasis on the importance of love and labor, we dwell in particular on the experience of work, managing relationships, and communicating as crucial for developing resilience, confidence, and competence within the context of family wealth.

The first four chapters lay out challenges faced by or strategies open to all members of rising generations in families with wealth. In Chapter 5, we apply this learning to the specific challenges faced by family members in the middle passage of life. If you are in this situation, you may have lived with decades of silence but now want to find your voice. We discuss ways to advocate for yourself as well as to avoid the snares often inherent in the ownership and leadership of family affairs.

The Conclusion reviews many of the lessons and principles that are shared in the five chapters. It also focuses on the question: who can help you, members of the rising generation, navigate your central work of individuation? We discuss two such helpers: elders and mentors. Elders help members of the rising generation through specific transitions. If you are lucky enough to find one, a mentor can help your entire life evolve.

At the end of each chapter we offer you, as a member of the rising generation, a question or questions to reflect upon. The Appendix recapitulates these questions and also provides references for other exercises and tools that you can use to guide yourself in pursuing the strategies discussed in the chapters. If you, your family, or your family's advisers would also like to plan a program to develop the capacities of the rising generation, the Appendix includes reference to a multistep curriculum that reduces the lessons of this book to a form that can be delivered and discussed over several meetings.

Again, our goal is to advance the conversation with the rising generation. Our hope is that, whatever your stage of life, you find that these pages prompt your reflection and growth, and that these chapters and these tools help your entire family rise to the challenge of fostering the flourishing of the rising generation.

Our Approach

Let's turn, then, to the conversation. We do not want to speak about or to members of the rising generation. We want to speak with you. Our goal is a conversation rather than a lecture. That is why each chapter of this book is short, readable on its own, and peppered with self-reflective questions. We want to give you an opportunity both to reflect and to take action. We hope to hear your full-throated voices rather than to cement your deafening silence. Most fundamentally, we want to open up for you a realm of true choice based on self-knowledge.

Our emphasis on choice is not incidental. One of the greatest sources of pain within families with wealth is the belief that there are no choices. Sometimes even wealth creators who feel very able in their businesses feel at the same time that their wealth will inevitably become a pernicious influence on their children and grandchildren. And it is not uncommon for members of the rising generation to feel that many of the important choices in their lives have been made by their parents or grandparents.

This sense of helplessness is part of the silence that we see befall rising generations, and it is a great obstacle to individual and family flourishing. Financial assets do not destroy families. A belief in our own incapacity does. This belief is what dissipates our human capital, our true asset. The way forward, then, depends on the realization that, while every family dissolves eventually, this outcome is not necessary at this moment in time. As common as it is for families to dissipate their wealth or even break apart, they do not have to—at least your family does not have to now, or next year, or within the next 10 or even 100 years. Despite the law of entropy, Mother Nature is kind: she says that the shirtsleeves proverb will eventually come true, but when it does is up to you. Families are made up of individuals, and as an individual you have choices.

This is the most important point: you, as a member of a rising generation, have choices. You may feel as though your life path was marked out even before you were born. This feeling may have some truth to it, especially if structures such as trusts play a large role in your family's life. But it masks a deeper truth: all these structures are external to our lives. No trust document can tell us what the right choice is. Such choices are our own. If we achieve nothing else in this book, we hope that we encourage—that is, give courage to—you in understanding and making these choices. In this sense, we see ourselves aligned with the character of Athena from The Odyssey, who appears at the beginning of the story in the guise of a family friend, and who encourages the young Telemachus to seek not only his father but, most importantly, himself. This bit of encouragement is all it takes to start an epic—if just one reader feels empowered by our pages to undertake such a journey, we have accomplished what we set out to do.

Aids to Navigation

Before turning to Chapter 1, we want to share some thoughts that we believe will help you start this voyage.

One of the most famous passages in The Odyssey occurs when Odysseus must steer his ship through a treacherous passage. On one side of the channel lies the voracious whirlpool Charybdis, which sucks in ships and crushes them to splinters. On the other side lurks the many-headed dragon Scylla, who will snatch and devour any sailors she can. Odysseus must steer a steady course between the two evils. It is a lesson about caution and the importance of the middle path.

We recommend that you also steer clear of two dangers that often beset families with significant wealth. They are not as dramatic as Scylla and Charybdis. But these dangers are more common than mythical monsters, and their effects are ultimately quite destructive.

The first danger that we have in mind is the tendency for families to give almost all their attention to the heroic founder of the fortune at the expense of the “next generations.” This tendency is understandable. The founder is often a larger-than-life figure. Think of such historical individuals as Mayer Rothschild, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and John D. Rockefeller, or of more modern wealth creators such as Sam Walton, Karl and Theo Albrecht, Liang Wengen, Gina Rinehart, Carlos Slim, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates. By creating great fortunes (or sometimes turning small fortunes into empires) these individuals tower above the crowd. They may also hold sway over almost every important family decision.

It is only right to give the founder or the hero his or her due. Homer named his poem the “Odyssey,” after Odysseus, not the “Telemachus.” But while this tendency to revere the heroic founder is understandable, if pushed too far it can do harm. As we will discuss in Chapter 1, you may easily find the founder's powerful example to be a black hole into which your own dreams and sense of self disappear. Measuring up to the founder's life can seem impossible.

It is for this reason that we recommend, to begin with, the relatively simple step that you avoid such terms as