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.

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

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

How we frame family enterprise transitions matters. In this thought-provoking article, Jean Meeks-Koch argues that the language commonly used by advisors—particularly the term succession—may inadvertently create resistance among founders by signaling loss, replacement, and diminished relevance.

The transition from a first trustee to a second trustee represents a pivotal moment in the life of a family system shaped by trusts.

In the fourth article in a series from FFI Virtual Study Groups, contributors examine how context shapes the practice of advising family enterprises in Latin America.

As an advisor working with family enterprises, it is important to recognize when ownership begins to feel like an obligation rather than a choice for next-generation members.

In this week’s edition of FFI Practitioner, Jay Hughes, Mary Duke, and Stacy Allred offer the first in their series of Reflections on Family Flourishing, a companion to their upcoming new book.

Thanks to the authors of this article—the first in the 2026 series from Withers—for their analysis of multi-generational investing in sports within the US.

Performance evaluation in family enterprises is more than a human resources process—it is central to fairness, accountability, and leadership credibility.

Family enterprise advisors are often trained through the lens of Bowen Family Systems Theory, which remains one of the most influential frameworks in the field.

In this first article of a quarterly series in 2026, Jay Hughes and Keith Whitaker turn their attention to a pivotal but often underexamined moment: the experience of engaging a trustee for the first time.

Succession in family enterprises is rarely just a legal or financial event—it is a test of leadership readiness, legitimacy, and continuity. Increasingly, research suggests that philanthropy can play a meaningful role in meeting these challenges.

Change initiatives in enterprising families rarely fail because of bad ideas or lack of commitment.

In this issue of FFI Practitioner, FFI Fellow Matthew Erskine examines the December 2024 Family Business Review article, “Why and How Do Family Firms Go Public? A Socioemotional Wealth Perspective of IPO.”

Thank you to Jamie Yuenger, founder of StoryKeep, for this article, which is a companion piece to the FFI Practitioner podcast episode, “The Power of Narrative in Family Businesses: A Conversation with Jamie Yuenger and Lisabeth Sugahara.”

FFI Practitioner is pleased to feature a podcast conversation with guests Jamie Yuenger from StoryKeep and Lisabeth Sugahara from Fairfield-Maxwell Ltd.