Home » Relationships » Family » Family Meetings
Category Archives: Family Meetings
Nilofer Merchant: Got a meeting? Take a walk
Nilofer Merchant: Got a meeting? Take a walk
Nilofer Merchant suggests a small idea that just might have a big impact on your life and health: Next time you have a one-on-one meeting, make it into a “walking meeting” — and let ideas flow while you walk and talk.
Business innovator Nilofer Merchant thinks deeply about the frameworks, strategies and cultural values of companies.
WHY YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO HER?
Nilofer Merchant has been helping to grow businesses — from Fortune 500s to web startups — for 20 years. She’s worked for major companies (like Apple and Autodesk) and early web startups (remember Golive?). Logitech, Symantec, HP, Yahoo, VMWare, and many others have turned to her guidance to develop new product strategies, enter new markets, defend against competitors and optimize revenue.
Today she serves on boards for both public and private companies, and writes books about collaboration, like The New How: Creating Business Solutions Through Collaborative Strategy, and openness — check out her recent ebook 11 Rules for Creating Value in the #SocialEra, chosen by Fast Company as one of the Best Business Books of 2012.
How to Create Camaraderie in Your Family Business
How to Create Camaraderie in Your Family Business
Family Business Coach, Pete Walsh, encourages family businesses to get out of the office and create camaraderie. Go on a camping trip, spa weekend, golf trip or whatever you like to do.
Bruce Feiler: Agile programming — for your family
Bruce Feiler: Agile programming — for your family
Bruce Feiler has a radical idea: To deal with the stress of modern family life, go agile. Inspired by agile software programming, Feiler introduces family practices which encourage flexibility, bottom-up idea flow, constant feedback and accountability. One surprising feature: Kids pick their own punishments.
Bruce Feiler is the author of “Council of Dads,” and the writer/presenter of the PBS miniseries “Walking the Bible.”
WHY YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO HIM?
Bruce Feiler is the author of nine books, including Walking the Bible, Abraham, and America’s Prophet. He is also the writer/presenter of the PBS miniseries Walking the Bible. His book The Council of Dads tells the uplifting story of how friendship and community can help one survive life’s greatest challenges. Most recently Feiler published The Secrets of Happy Families, in which he calls for a new approach to family dynamics, inspired by cutting-edge techniques gathered from experts in the disciplines of science, business, sports and the military.
Feiler’s early books involve immersing himself in different cultures and bringing other worlds vividly to life. These include Learning to Bow, an account of the year he spent teaching in rural Japan; Looking for Class, about life inside Oxford and Cambridge; and Under the Big Top, which depicts the year he spent performing as a clown in the Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus.
Walking the Bible describes his perilous, 10,000-mile journey retracing the Five Books of Moses through the desert. The book was hailed as an “instant classic” by the Washington Postand “thoughtful, informed, and perceptive” by the New York Times.
Some Core Principles for Building a Legacy
To build a sustainable and positive family or business legacy, it is very important that the following key principles be incorporated into your dynastic planning process:
1) The entire family must be involved in planning and NOT just the wealth-holder or business owner. The goal for a successful multi-generational family/business legacy is to plan “with” your family and not “at” your family.
2) The agenda for each family or family business meeting must be open to include the needs and concerns of all family members who are affected by the financial, estate, business, or legacy plan.
3) Part of the common mission for each family and business plan should be the indisputable realization that family members are the real assets and NOT the money or business.
4) Communication expectations for everyone must be setup upfront. For example,
- Everyone has wisdom;
- We need everyone’s wisdom for the wisest results;
- All will hear and be heard;
- There are no wrong answers;
- The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
5) The best legacy solution is one that considers the needs of future generations. A legacy plan should focus on the perspective of family wealth and the family business for at least the next seven generations.
6) A Family Constitution should be created to help with the Governance of the Legacy plan. The goal here is not to dictate the future to family members but to establish guidelines for dealing with conflicts, new opportunities, in-laws, extended family member dreams, and the future complexity involved with the growth of family members into the third generation onward.
7) Structures, and committees, must be put in place for dealing with, and implementing, the financial, estate, business, and legacy plans.
Remember that a wealthy family or a profitable business cannot create a strong family but a united family with a common mission can build wealth and a sustainable and profitable family business.
Jeffrey Kluger: The sibling bond
Were you the favorite child, the wild child or the middle child? Jeffrey Kluger explores the profound life-long bond between brothers and sisters, and the influence of birth order, favoritism and sibling rivalry.
A senior editor of science and technology reporting at TIME magazine, Jeffrey Kluger has written books on a wide range of science subjects, including the Polio vaccine, Apollo 13 and the effect of sibling relationships.
Why you should listen to him:
Jeffrey Kluger is a senior editor at TIME magazine, where he has worked since 1996. In 1994, he co-authored Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13, which was the basis for the Tom Hanks film Apollo 13. His book about Jonas Salk and the Polio vaccine, Splendid Solution, was published in 2006. Three years later, he published Simplexity: Why Simple Things Become Complex (and Why Complex Things Can Be Made Simple). His latest book, The Sibling Effect, came out in 2011.
“Jeffrey Kluger integrates the latest research and brings his own fresh thinking to an ancient topic: sibling relationships. He weaves his own sibling experiences into his rich, insightful text. As with all good storytellers, Kluger’s stories are sad/happy and heartbreaking/glorious.”
Mary Pipher, author of Reviving Ophelia
