Emotion before structure

The tools of wealth transfer are old and well tested. Marshall Jen, a scholar-practitioner on Asian family wealth, points out that families have used trusts and insurance for a century, yet disputes and divorces still occur and assets can be frozen while they do. His explanation is simple.

People are fighting over emotion rather than ownership.

— Marshall Jen, Wealth Office

Jen adds that family members often mean different things by succession. Parents tend to think of values and stories, children of leadership transition or asset management. The structures can be sound and still fail if those meanings are never reconciled.

Philip Marcovici, a former tax lawyer who has advised wealth and business-owning families for more than four decades, reaches the same point from long experience. His first book examined the destructive power of family wealth, and his starting premise is uncomfortable. Any amount of wealth, he says, is enough to destroy a family. In his words, money makes people nuts, at every level of the family. His more recent book, The Transformative Power of Family Wealth, asks how the same resources can strengthen a family and its wider community.

Culture is no excuse

Both guests resist the idea that some families are exempt. Jen describes Asian families as a different type of engine, and says the same trait can be a downfall because they let emotion take over. Marcovici goes further and treats cultural explanations as a common way to avoid hard conversations.

The bottom line is culture is important. However, it's way overplayed and it's way used as an excuse to not do the work necessary within families to really think about succession and transition.

— Philip Marcovici, Wealth Office

His remedy is open communication and involvement. Success in succession, he argues, is dictated by the next generation, so they should help shape the plan. When working on family constitutions he interviews each family member individually. He also urges preparation for everyone who may one day hold the money. Women, he observes, often end up with it, because they tend to outlive men or through divorce, and he has seen elderly family members placed under undue pressure to change succession arrangements. His planning discipline, which he summarises as trusting nobody, starts by asking what could go wrong.

Rules, roles and trust

Some families manage the human system with simple rules. Allen Law describes a Hong Kong family that follows a principle of one family member in one business unit. As the family grew from his grandfather to six members in his father's generation and many more in his own, the rule demanded new ventures, from garment manufacturing to real estate, hotels, fitness and longevity. Law credits it with keeping the family entrepreneurial while preserving wealth. He is also candid that family backing can become a hindrance when members disagree on risk and reward.

William Louey, who took on responsibility for the Kowloon Motor Bus family at 19, chose a different arrangement. Deciding he was not good at business, he employed a chief executive and became a figurehead and communicator. He argues that families do not need to own a business outright, and that each board member should contribute a distinct ability. His own is communicating with frontline staff, while others bring finance, government relations or links with transport systems worldwide. Macfarlane frames the decision as a lesson in trust and ego, which Louey answers simply by saying he has no ego.

Jen proposes a broader version of the same division, with families acting as strategists and professionals as tacticians. Families, in his model, should learn much of what professionals know and add their own family knowledge to form a strategy and build alignment. He sees that partnership in Hong Kong's long-established family businesses, whose founders had clear visions and hired professionals who understood them. Underneath any structure, he places a single principle.

And I told him the highest level of governance is that you actually trust each other.

— Marshall Jen, Wealth Office

Decisions made together

The human system shows up in places beyond governance documents. Gary Hersham and Irina Gamagina, who work with buyers of ultra-prime property in London, describe purchases as decisions made by the family as a whole, shaped by children, schools and space. Gamagina sees families moving just outside London for schools with more room for sport, and younger buyers preferring practical new homes to historic houses.

Succession itself is a shared decision that is often left unshared. Jen notes that next-generation executives may hold the title while patriarchs in their eighties still make the decisions, and that heirs may fear a mistake will harm their reputation and their inheritance.

Philanthropy is another meeting point. Marcovici sees wasted resources in families that focus only on the children who return to run the business, and argues that impact and philanthropy can draw others into stewardship. He describes a daughter who planned to give away a couple of hundred million US dollars and instead became interested in stewarding it, and the family's larger assets, to do good over generations. Elaine Chow makes a similar case for the family office itself. In the Chinese context, she says, everyone in the family works for the family business, yet some members are not motivated by it. A family office can give them a vehicle to pursue causes such as caring for the sick or fundraising for hospitals.

Across these conversations, the family emerges as a system of relationships with money running through it. The guests differ in their prescriptions, from rules about business units to individual interviews and shared decisions about homes. They agree that structures work only when the people inside them talk, trust one another and are prepared for the roles they may one day hold.