Foundational Practice Cases

The cases in this volume are not client stories. They are not marketing materials. They are not evidence of outcomes achieved. They are teaching cases — representative instruments of a discipline that is still being formed, offered to practitioners, families, and students of institutional decision-making with the same purpose that animates the great case traditions of law, medicine, and management: not to describe what happened, but to illuminate how a disciplined mind approaches situations that resist simple analysis.

Each case in this volume synthesizes recurring patterns observed across family enterprises, generational transitions, governance failures, stewardship crises, and institutional design challenges. No case represents a single identifiable family. Each represents a recurring configuration of forces — the kind of situation that presents itself with different names and different numbers but with the same underlying structure, year after year, in the practices of advisors who are prepared to recognize it.

The Practice of Generative Wealth addresses questions that no individual advisory discipline — law, finance, psychology, organizational design — addresses completely. Each discipline has jurisdiction over part of the challenge. The Practice holds the whole of it: the question of what wealth is for, who is responsible for it, what it demands of the people who hold it, and what must be built — institutionally, relationally, philosophically — for it to remain generative across generations.

A reader who finishes this volume should arrive at two convictions: that this Practice approaches families differently than any existing advisory profession; and that these cases teach how the discipline thinks — not merely what it recommends.