What happens when a family’s financial success outpaces its emotional connection?

Thank you to Jon Martinez for this week’s edition, which examines a leadership role that family enterprises may overlook: the chief governance officer.

Most family enterprise boards perform exactly the job they were designed to do.

Family enterprise disputes often combine legal and financial questions with deeply personal concerns involving fairness, identity, legacy, and belonging.

Inherited wealth can create extraordinary opportunity, but it can also raise difficult questions about identity, purpose, relationships, and belonging.

Family enterprise advisors regularly encounter legal issues that are easy to overlook because they are embedded in family relationships, informal practices, and expectations about the future.

In this week’s edition of FFI Practitioner, William Kambas of Withers and Amy Szostak of Northern Trust explore how estate-planning structures can help prepare rising-generation family members to understand, participate in, and eventually steward shared assets.

For family enterprise advisors, engaging passive shareholders is often framed as a governance challenge.

In this week’s Practitioner podcast, Martha Frick Symington Sanger, great-granddaughter of Henry Clay Frick, explores how family trauma can live on through stories, silences, and the objects passed from one generation to the next.

Choosing a family member to lead the enterprise is rarely a purely rational decision. Familiarity, lineage, seniority, and family expectations can easily overshadow the capabilities the business will need next.

How can the brain respond to something the conscious mind never perceived? And why does calming the amygdala not necessarily change the beliefs and behaviors connected to fear?

Drawing on survey findings and the experiences of hundreds of family enterprise advisors, Dennis Jaffe and Chris Graves examine the psychological, relational, and practical barriers that often stall transition planning.

Family enterprise conflicts are not always about the issue at hand. Rebecca Meyer and Carolyn Greenspon introduce the concept of "frozen narratives" and explore how unresolved interpretations of the past can shape governance, relationships, and decision-making for years to come.

In the fifth article in our 2026 series from FFI Virtual Study Groups, Hamza Nidaazzi and Dave Specht of the VSG for Africa examine what makes a question truly effective, especially across cultures.

In this third issue of our 2026 series from BanyanGlobal, Rebecca Yu and Rob Lachenauer challenge the conventional wisdom of a slow succession process, arguing that, in some cases, prolonged transitions can create ambiguity, undermine new leadership, and ultimately delay the very change they are intended to support.

As we reach the midpoint of 2026, we're taking a moment to look back at the editions that resonated most with our readers.

Family trusts are typically viewed as legal and financial structures, but what if they are also members of the family system?

As artificial intelligence reshapes how knowledge is captured and shared, family enterprises face a provocative new question: Can judgment itself be inherited?

Prenuptial agreements are often viewed primarily as legal documents designed to protect assets in the event of divorce.

Family businesses often balance two powerful forces: the emotional bonds that sustain the enterprise and the governance structures needed to ensure long-term success.