The De Gruyter Handbook of Business Families (2023) brings together work from leading academics who explore emerging research themes relevant to business families, particularly drawing in new insights from adjacent disciplines that can advance the family business field. The handbook challenges the traditional notion of the “single firm–single family,” acknowledging that families may simultaneously own or control multiple businesses as well as substantial wealth beyond these firms in the form of financial and non-financial assets.

FFI members who contributed to chapters in the book include Navneet Bhatnagar, Neus Feliu, Yasaman Gorji, Peter Jaskiewicz, Nadine Kammerlander, and Rania Labaki.

In Don’t Leave a Mess! (November 2022) estate planner and family business advisor Sandy Pollack unpacks what it means to make wise choices for your business that not only protect what you have worked so hard to build but reflect your why. With more than twenty years in the industry, Sandy helps family business owners unravel the complexities that running a successful business and building significant wealth can create.

Own It! How to Develop a Family Enterprise Owner’s Mindset at Every Age (November 2022) serves as a resource and support tool to help enterprising families learn and develop thoughtful, capable ownership by investing in and nurturing an owner’s mindset. This includes building “ownership literacy,” along with a genuine sense of stewardship. It offers a learning structure and approach for each stage of an owner’s development across the lifespan (from earliest years to retirement), taking into consideration the lifecycle stages of the family. The book provides enterprising families and their advisors with examples and practical advice for the promotion of knowledge, skills, and capabilities that incorporate a broad range of topics spanning from personal and interpersonal, to leadership and wealth, to business, ownership, and financial.

Preserving Multigenerational Wealth: How to Lead a Flourishing Family Enterprise by Dirk Jungé

Preserving Multigenerational Wealth (Fall 2023) is both a helpful guide for enterprise families and a family history. Just like many advisors’ clients, the Pitcairn Family faced questions of family legacy and wealth management when when members of the third and fourth generations had differing ideas about how to operate the family businesses. Dirk Jungé, a fourth-generation Pitcairn family member, helped his family overcome these obstacles when, in 1987, the family transitioned from focusing on its own wealth management to helping other families preserve their multigenerational wealth. As Dirk told prospective clients, “We’ve made all the mistakes your family doesn’t want to make.” Preserving Multigenerational Wealth collects the wisdom from Dirk’s decades of experience in a comprehensive, insightful, and easily applicable book.

More than four decades ago, the field of family wealth advising began to emerge as a challenge to the tradition of caring only about the money. We now stand at the threshold to the next major transformation, strengthening the focus on family while shedding the fears and flaws that invaded beliefs about the rich. Written by three renowned experts, Wealth 3.0: The Future of Family Wealth Advising (July 2023) outlines how the field arrived at this point and what will be needed to establish a positive vision of family wealth. Through relatable stories and insightful recommendations, Wealth 3.0 is a modern manifesto. It challenges family wealth advising to become the enduring, scalable, rigorous profession it was always destined to be.

James Grubman, Dennis Jaffe, and Kristin Keffeler are presenting the session “Wealth 3.0: A new paradigm for education and research in family wealth advising” at the FFI Global Conference in October.