This session explores how advisors can work with clients to design and implement investment policies that align with their shared values, culture, and family members’ heterogeneous objectives. Through a combination of conceptual frameworks, case studies, and group discussions, participants will learn how to address challenges like within-family heterogeneity and competing financial priorities.

The enterprising family signifies a renaissance in family business strategy and leadership thinking, characterized by a complex interplay of various elements including entrepreneurship, leadership, psychology, economics, strategy, governance, family dynamics, and the macro environment. Each of these facets contributes significantly to how enterprising families operate and influence both their internal structures and macro environment.

This brief presentation draws attention to the family enterprise advisory field and how the very acts of studying and advising founders and families are a yet-to-be measured piece of legacy making. These questions could help answer whether practitioners are on a path to an iron cage/“legacy in a box” solution or a repertoire of legacy-making processes.

Family business owners guard against threats to their values, cultural traditions, and working relationships. Yet the next generation can return from education abroad with new cultural influences that might clash with espoused values and culture, straining family and non-family relationships within the business. This presentation explores real-life examples of how the cross-fertilization of world cultures is creating common clashes within family businesses.

A shareholder agreement (SA) is not just a legal document; it’s a tool that binds owners together. However, in some instances, owners band together in a way that creates a single dominant owner that could exploit the system for personal gain. Research reveals which shareholder agreements are valuable, which provisions add value, and in which types of family firms SAs dramatically enhance market value.

Tommy Phun partnered with his founding generation leaders, government, and other business families to launch his startup Pyxis, which seeks sustainable solutions in the coastal vessel industry. By sharing Tommy Phun’s story, the objective of this session is to provide participants with inspiration to reevaluate their own strategies in working with family enterprises’ challenges and opportunities.

Family businesses thrive in some of the world’s toughest environments. This is also precisely where enterprising families dominate, their businesses enduring wars, lawlessness, market failures, environmental disasters, and more. They can provide vital lessons for businesses everywhere, as world’s most advanced economies will increasingly experience these types of structural shocks and chronic uncertainties in the years ahead.

The session’s objective is to make those involved in family firms—advisors as well as family members—aware of the ways in which they can improve their chances of making better judgments in the most important choices that firms and family members have to make. These include choices involving the trusted advisor, financial management, wealth management, and artificial intelligence, as well as judgments about other family members as colleagues and employees.