2017 Keynote Speaker and biological anthropologist, Dr. Helen Fisher shares her research on the evolution of team-building, identifying four distinct styles of thinking and their implications on the composition of the family enterprise.

Parents who are owners of family companies are generally intensely interested in their children’s development both as healthy, aspiring individuals and as future owners.

Points of significant change and transition in the life of a family business lead to predictable psychological reactions.

When a family-owned business needs to recruit a non-family CEO or COO, a well-structured Long Term Incentive Program (LTIP) is essential in attracting an outstanding candidate. However, LTIPs can make some family business owners uncomfortable.

Usually the most prized thing that we as established practitioners lose is our creativity. Once a niche is carved and sustained over decades of hard work, inevitably, at some point in time, complacency sets in.

Two brothers, Andrew and Dave, started a health-related service business in Dave’s basement.

I think advisors recognize that business owners have an added level of complexity in their lives — this holds true for wealth-holding families as well. This complexity is just a natural part of the system.

As advisors, we see how fear grips family firms and interferes with the work we are hired to do. Decisions on issues like succession are delayed, and difficult conversations about wealth are avoided.

n the beginning, it was all about the founders’ quest for anonymity, to keep the family under the radar and the family business link private.

Thanks to Mariana Martinez, founder of Bethesda Family Therapy, for her blog exploring the relationships between human and animal groups and how individuals in both systems effect the system itself.

Thanks to FFI Fellow, Randy Waesche, Resource Management LLC, for focusing our attention on the concepts, impacts and effects of money on multi-generational companies.

You can find issues more uncomfortable than prenuptial agreements. But not many. For starters, people view prenups from amazingly different points of view.

Transformation this article makes the claim that mediation, a private, voluntary and creative process, can be designed to effectively address and resolve conflict among family members engaged in family enterprise(s) and that mediation can be a transformative process.

Business is all about the future. An entrepreneur takes an idea and makes it into a service or product that people will want, even need, for years to come.

The first issue in a five week series based on the 2016 Global conference theme of Adapt | Evolve | Transform. This series focuses on transforming and transformative ideas, theories and interventions in the family enterprise field.

Thanks to Paul Karofsky and Kirby Rosplock for this interview on managing change in your family business practice.

Since the theme of The Practitioner this month is one of transformation, I would like to share the lessons learned from my transformation from family business owner to doctoral student to professional consultant.

Thanks to Jane Glover and Karen Vinton, FBR assistant editor, for this podcast on Sustaining the Family Business with Minimal Financial Rewards: How Do Family Farms Continue?

Thanks to this week’s contributor Laurent Roux of Gallatin Wealth Management for his thoughtful and informative article on the Private Trust Company (PTC).

Thanks to this week’s blogger, Luke Simmering, for his focus on the “driving force” in family business.