FOXcast

Today, I am particularly honored to welcome Prof. Michael Feiner, President at Michael C. Feiner Consulting. From 2000 to 2010, Michael was Professor of Management and Ethics Fellow at Columbia Graduate School of Business, and I was lucky enough, as an MBA student at Columbia Business School in 2003, to take his High-Performance Leadership class, which in many ways has shaped me as a business leader. Prior to teaching and consulting, Michael was a senior executive at Pepsi for 20 years and was Senior VP and Worldwide Chief People Officer for the consumer-packaged goods giant. He now advises a wide variety of organizations, including private equity firms, Fortune 500 companies, and fast-growing start-ups. Michael talks about how the field of high-performance leadership has evolved over the past 20+ years and how learning institutions and business organizations are teaching the required skillsets and developing high-performance leaders. We unpack the reality of high-performance leadership and examine whether the discipline is now fully embraced and practiced by HR departments and governance board or are leaders still generally left to “learn on the job”. Michael draws on his nearly 5 decades of experience as a human capital leader, executive coach, and leadership guru to share some practical tips for leaders who want to master the art of high-performance leadership and apply it in their day-to-day work with their teams. He also sheds light on what team members can and should be doing to best engage their leaders and to encourage and incite high-performance leadership from their superiors. Please enjoy this insightful and practical conversation with one of the most celebrated people leaders and leadership thinkers, and sample some of the most valuable and enduring leadership lessons that I personally have learned from Prof. Michael Feiner from my days at Columbia Business School and have tested and applied throughout my own (ongoing) leadership journey.

This week, I am delighted to welcome Dr. Dennis Jaffe, Senior Research Fellow at BanyanGlobal Family Business Advisors, trusted advisor to numerous enterprise families, and celebrated author of such iconic books in our industry as the recently published Wealth 3.0: The Future of Family Wealth Advising and Borrowed from Your Grandchildren: The Evolution of 100-Year Family Enterprises. Dennis shares some of the key findings of his immense catalog of research and thought leadership in the field of family well-being and wealth management, particularly drawing on his ongoing study of the Resilience of 100-Year Family Enterprises. He emphasizes the criticality of positive thinking, motivation, and engagement and the importance of not succumbing to popular negative myths about enterprising families of wealth. Drawing on his decades of advising successful multigenerational families, Dennis highlights some of the practical tools families can put to work to emulate the success of the enduring, “generative” families he has studied. He has created some of the most widely used tools in the industry, such as The Values Edge and Family Enterprise Assessment Tool (FEAT) and provides tips on when and how families can peruse them. Dennis also offers some reflections and recommendations for family wealth advisors for how best to serve enterprise families and help them engage their family members across generations in a positive, generative, and inspiring way. Don’t miss this enlightening conversation with one of the pioneers and best recognized thought leaders of the family wealth advisory profession.

Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Ellen Perry, founder and Managing Partner of Wealthbridge Partners. In 1989, Ellen co-founded GenSpring Family Offices, which became one of the leading fee-only multifamily office firms and was acquired by SunTust Bank in 2001. The GenSpring brand continues to this day as part of Truist Bank. She is the author of “A Wealth of Possibilities – Navigating Family, Money and Legacy” – a vital resource for families who seek to better understand the qualitative issues associated with their human capital. Ellen talks about her discovery and immersion into family systems theory and shares the key learnings she derived from this body of knowledge and their applications in her work with families. Ellen reflects on the most important priority for any family, and any family system – ensuring the well-being of their children and the success and happiness of the future generation. Having worked with many families to help them prepare their rising generation and pass on the family ethos and values, Ellen shares her observations on how well families are doing today at this all-important task and how successful parents and family leaders are in nurturing the young members of the family to be happy and fulfilled and how they are engaging them to become the future leaders of the family. Ellen offers her tips on the practical frameworks she uses with families to engage and empower their young family members, such as the “Four Meaningful Questions” and the “Life Values Inventory” and talks about how she uses these tools to guide families to establish deeper connections, emotional intimacy, and enhanced well-being for their members. Finally, Ellen contemplates the role of the family’s advisors in this process – both the ones working inside the family enterprise or single-family office and the trusted external advisors working for outside firms. She shares her views on what the family wealth advisory industry should be doing to advance the cause of stronger connections within the family and to help families flourish across generations. We hope you enjoy this conversation with one of the most influential and thoughtful founders and shapers of the family wealth advisory field.

I am absolutely delighted to speak today with Joline Godfrey, highly respected family advisor, educator, and author of many books, including the all-time classic “Raising Financially Fit Kids”. In 1992, Joline founded An Income of Her Own, the first non-profit focused exclusively on financial education for girls and women, and subsequently started Independent Means Inc. to provide financial education to girls and boys, which was acquired in 2015. She is now the Founder of Bounce10, a brand-new startup financial parenting platform offering highly bespoke financial education to families. Joline has been a pioneer and industry trailblazer in the field of family education, especially in helping families prepare and equip their rising generations with the life skills and financial fluency required for them to be successful. In this episode, she shares her views on the current state of how ready and prepared families feel to cope with the future and the constant change they face and offers some valuable and practical learning and engagement tools. Joline shares her unique insights from working with the youngest family members, those in their 20s and younger, and talks about the unique challenges Gen Z family members face today and how are they different from what young people in prior generations have had to contend with throughout history. Given the unprecedented disruptions young people face today, Joline offers some practical and important steps families can, and must, take to help ready their future generations and highlights some of the best tools, frameworks, or solutions families can utilize to educate and inspire their young members. Finally, since nowadays families rely on an ever-growing constellation of family wealth advisors to accomplish their goals, Joline provides some suggestions and ideas for family advisors, many of whom come from deeply technical and quantitative disciplines. She shares her ideas on how advisors can be more supportive and relevant to their clients by helping the families they serve better prepare, educate, and engage their younger family members for the uncertainties of the future. Enjoy this fascinating conversation with our industry’s best known and highly regarded pioneer of family learning and rising-gen education.

I am speaking today with Bill Benjamin, partner at the Institute for Health and Human Potential (IHHP), and an expert in emotional intelligence, performance, and leadership. Recently, Bill delivered a keynote address at the 2023 FOX Family Office & Wealth Advisor Forum in Chicago to some 130 FO professionals, which was very enthusiastically received. Bill unpacks the concept of the “Last 8%” in human behavior and interactions and outlines the characteristics and implications of building and fostering a “Last 8%” organizational culture. He delves into the brain science that underlies this concept, and particularly the “amygdala hijack” phenomenon that most commonly gets in the way of achieving the right balance of human connection and social courage. Finally, Bill emphasizes the importance of cultivating and demonstrating empathy and offers practical tools for bridging the “understanding gap” in human interactions and interpersonal relationships, which is critical to successfully building a high-courage, high-connection culture. Please enjoy this illuminating, yet practical, discussion on one of the most relevant and consequential human capital topics affecting our industry.

This week, I’m speaking with Josh Kanter, Principal at Josh Kanter Wealth Advisory Services and Founder of leafplanner. Over the past 20 years, Josh has been an “owner-operator”, leading his family’s family office and consulting with other families. He is a long-time FOX member and an active and valued contributor to the FOX community – especially by generously and frequently sharing his knowledge, connections, and insights with his fellow FOX members on our popular member-only peer-chat application, FOXChat. Josh starts by sharing the very personal story of how he came into his current leadership role within his family enterprise at a difficult time for the family when his father’s health was deteriorating – and the lessons he drew from this transformative experience about what it means to be fully prepared or to be able to pass down all the knowledge the family needs. From these lessons, Josh synthesizes some of the common challenges faced by owners during such times of family transition or untimely disruption. Josh describes the importance of having a 360-degree view of the family’s information and introduces the concept of a “family owner’s manual” that can allow a family to identify blind spots, educate family members and advisors, and prepare a family for an effective, comprehensive, and efficient succession. He talks about the different approaches and tools in the marketplace to create and maintain this kind of single-source family knowledge and information hub and shares the reasons he decided to create leafplanner, first as a solution for his own family’s needs and now as a comprehensive digital platform for other families to benefit from. Enjoy this informative and practical conversation with one of the most active and generous members of the FOX community and a leading expert on family governance, estate planning, and family information management.

Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with our very own Jeff Strese, a human capital expert and executive coach focused on family-owned business leaders and senior wealth advisors. He works as consultant at FOX to develop transformational leadership programs and support our councils with thought leadership on human capital, generational transitions, and family dynamics. Jeff also teaches in the Executive Education program at SMU’s COX School of Business based in Dallas, TX. In this podcast, Jeff shares his definition and scope of human capital and offers insights into why so many organizations struggle to understand and manage the unique challenges of finding, retaining, and growing talented professionals. He talks about the role and importance of culture in retaining and developing human capital and offers his views into how organizations can take a “diagnostic” approach to culture and human capital. Jeff’s background is truly unique, combining several fields of people management expertise, including HR, organizational development, and family systems. He talks about how he integrates these distinct disciplines when working with leaders and advisors from SFOs and MFOs. The role of culture and the scope of people management in the family office space is uniquely expanded, compared to the regular corporate world, since traditional human resource topics and skillsets are often intermingled with family psychology and interpersonal dynamics that arise only when working with or supporting multigenerational families of wealth and their complex enterprises. Finally, Jeff talks about some of the most important – and maybe neglected – skills and abilities that families and their advisors need to develop to best cultivate their human capital, both within the family and its family office and across its broader ecosystem of advisor firms. Jeff provides a practical overview of the tools and resources that exist today for families, family offices, and family wealth advisors to grow, enhance, and retain their human capital, while equipping the family and the family enterprise with the right mindset, education, and capabilities to succeed and flourish across generations. Please enjoy this enlightening conversation with one of the experienced, connected, and well-liked human capital professionals the family learning and family wealth management space.

This week, I am excited to speak with Ken Franasiak, Chairman & CEO at Calamar Enterprises – a major privately owned full-service, vertically integrated real estate organization comprised of finance, development, construction, and asset management divisions with over 100 separate LLC’s under its umbrella. The topic of our discussion is the current state and likely future of commercial real estate both as an investment asset class and as an operating business sector. As a third-generation family enterprise leader, 30-year veteran investor and operator in commercial real estate, and former advisor to the New York Federal Reserve Board, Ken brings a unique perspective to this conversation. He shares his views on the economic, demographic, and behavioral trends that are currently reshaping commercial real estate and their effects on investors, developers, and operators. Ken also offers valuable insights into the impact of these current trends on the financial and operating ecosystem that surrounds commercial real estate, especially the state of the credit markets and the financial institutions that fuel and support the industry. To his fellow direct-investing families and family offices, who are active investors in real estate as an asset class, Ken extends his views on what to watch out for right now and how to protect their investment portfolios against the adverse trends impacting commercial real estate. But he also makes it clear that not all is doom and gloom and offers his tips on the sub-sectors where he sees bright spots and attractive opportunities for families to invest in commercial real estate – something Ken and his family enterprise, Calamar, have been doing successfully for over three decades. If you are even remotely interested in commercial real estate, you would not want to miss this enlightening conversation with one of the most experienced and thoughtful family investors in this sector.

I am speaking today with Dan Tarlas, Senior Managing Director at Asset Consulting Group (ACG) – a seasoned investment consultant who has provided comprehensive investment expertise to multigenerational families for over 30 years. Dan, along with his firm, ACG, is also a long-time member of the FOX Thought Leaders Council. Dan and ACG have worked with numerous enterprise families over the decades, and he shares the insights he has accumulated on the opportunities families have to optimize the returns and costs of their investment portfolios. Often families’ portfolios have been constructed, or in many cases merely accumulated, over time without an overarching strategy or comprehensive oversight, and thus there are redundancies and inefficiencies that are weighing on the net returns. The opportunities to optimize are not just limited to the costs and returns of the family portfolio but also extend to the risk side. For many families, there are risks inherent in their investment portfolios that they may not even be aware of or are managing sub-optimally. Dan talks about the concept of the family having and managing an “investment program”, rather than just an “investment portfolio”, and how that approach can be essential for optimizing their typically fragmented public investments. With many enterprise families being very active in private equity and direct investing, Dan also shares his experience helping them and their family offices better understand, manage, and optimize the family’s growing and increasingly complex portfolios of private investments. Enjoy this enlightening and practical conversation with one of the most experienced and prominent investment consultants in the FOX community who has spent the better part of the last 30 years helping and advising multigenerational families.

In this episode, I have the pleasure of speaking with Leslie Voth, Chairman, Chief Executive Officer & President of Pitcairn. Leslie has been with Pitcairn for 30 years, serving in a variety of leadership roles, and is the first chairman of the board who is not part of the Pitcairn family. She is a prominent senior executive and thought leader in the multifamily-office (MFO) industry. Leslie shares the story of Pitcairn, which this year celebrates its 100th anniversary, and its evolution from a firm initially established to serve the needs of one family to its status today as a premier player in the fast-evolving MFO space. We discuss the factors that enabled Pitcairn’s continued presence and enduring relevance as a top MFO, and Leslie offers her thoughts on the on the formula for MFO longevity and enduring success. As the MFO model continues to gain popularity among private wealth clients and companies in this space experience growing interest from families, Leslie offers her perspective on the challenges and opportunities faced by many firms established in this segment as well as those that are transitioning into the MFO model. We talk about growing and developing scarce human capital, building a sustainable and profitable business model and pricing structures, and nurturing an ecosystem of specialized and reputable partners to meet the increasingly complex and niche needs of enterprise families. Leslie and I also discuss what families need to know and what parameters to evaluate as many of them consider whether to build their own single-family office or outsource their service needs to an established and capable MFO. Please enjoy this illuminating conversation with one of the most distinguished CEOs in our industry, who is successfully leading one of the most storied MFO brands into its second century of success and prominence.