A family needs to understand its purpose. While I believe the purpose of a family is to enhance the pursuit of happiness of its individual members, and thereby preserve its human, intellectual, and financial capital, each family must determine and define its philosophy for itself. The first goal of a mission statement is, therefore, just that: to define the family's philosophy of its purpose.

A family must have a common vision. It must look ahead to the future and form a consensus on a shared goal. A family should ask itself how it plans to achieve its current goals, while looking ahead twenty, fifty, and one hundred years, as discussed in Chapter 1. It must embrace the seventh-generation thinking of the Iroquois.

A family shares certain values. I like to think that these are the values that create that family's uniqueness. In America this is a particularly difficult issue, because many Americans are uncomfortable thinking about themselves as "different." Americans still maintain the cultural myth of common membership in the middle class. Wealth automatically sets a family apart and makes it acutely sensitive to any suggestion that it is in fact different. How then to select the values that express a particular family's differentness? Later in this chapter, I've given some suggestions on how to do this.

A family needs to acknowledge its "secrets." Every family believes that it knows secrets about itself and other families. In my experience of families and other forms of organization, and as John O'Neil teaches in his book The Paradox of Success, there are in fact no secrets. These apparent secrets are one of the most perfidious problems in family governance, and they sit invisibly on the liability side of a family's balance sheet. They can undermine a family faster than any other single liability.

Here is an example of the deleterious effect of unacknowledged secrets. I was once asked by a family to help it form a governing structure. The family prided itself on its close family ties, its successful annual meetings, and its general feeling of well-being. I wondered, with all these positives, what I could do to help. After interviewing the senior members of the family, I discovered that in fact the family's governance was in chaos because of secrets everyone thought they were keeping but everyone actually knew. One daughter was an alcoholic, a son was a drug addict, and another daughter was married to a man no one liked. When the family held meetings, none of these facts were acknowledged, so the problems went unaddressed. Their meetings consisted of platitudes about what a wonderful family they were and how well all members were doing. Not only was the family failing to preserve its financial wealth, it w as draining its human and intellectual capital. It was in entropy. I pointed out to the senior members my views that these nonsecrets were undermining all of their wealth preservation efforts. Happily, they understood and ultimately agreed with me. The family is now on a changed course to real wealth preservation.

I'm sure some of you are concerned about confidentiality and about people being given financial information before they are educated to use it properly. Please understand that confidentiality in general and the dissemination of financial information to family members only as they are educated to absorb it are excellent values and ones to which I subscribe. These values can be stressed in a family mission statement. "Secrets," however, are pernicious, and a family mission statement should rule them out. I feel very strongly that the creation of a family mission statement provides the opportunity to discuss each family member's views on the subject of secrets, confidentiality, and the dissemination of information. The family mission statement should include a section reflecting the family's consensus on this subject and should recognize clearly the difference between the negative effects of protecting illusory secrets and the positive benefits of confidentiality.

A family needs to recount its history. The preparation of a family mission statement affords a family an opportunity to tell its family stories. Family stories are the glue that binds together individual family members. Every family I know that is successfully preserving its wealth sets aside time at its family gatherings for the sharing of its unique history. Both young and old tell the stories and in this way discover their common bonds and values. A family mission statement should express the family's unique history.

A family must choose a form of governance. Chapter 1 discusses the possible forms of governance. The family mission statement should indicate the form of governance selected by the family and how it will assist in long-term wealth preservation.

Each person needs to understand his or her role in the family. A final purpose for the preparation of a family mission statement is the opportunity it affords each individual family member to consider her or his mission as a member of the family and as an individual. I recommend that each family member prepare a personal mission statement.

1) Agree to certain important rules for the conducting of family meetings. For these rules I am indebted to two of the important advisers in the field of counseling families, David Bork and Lee Hausner. David Bork sets out the Basque rules for holding a meeting, which I paraphrase as: Show up. Come to the meeting alert, ready to work, and having read any pre-meeting materials. Listen attentively. Don't interrupt the speaker, listen carefully, and be able to play back to the speaker what you heard to assure him or her you understood what was said.

Speak your truth without fear of blame or judgment. Understand that you are in a safe environment, where your views are solicited and respected.

Do not be committed to outcomes. The worst possible family meeting is one at which each member arrives with an expected outcome, creates an adversarial atmosphere, and goes home angry if he doesn't get the outcome he wanted. Family meetings are places to find consensus toward the long-term mission of wealth preservation. Any member's attachment to a short-term objective can create hurdles so high that they frustrate the achievement of long-term objectives. As in the Aristotelian republic, every member should come to the meeting with an open mind, then listen to the arguments, weigh them against his or her truth, and only then decide the disposition of that meeting's issues.

Lee Hausner, author of Children of Paradise: Successful Parenting for Prosperous Families, adds a special rule for all family meetings: "Never start a sentence with the word 'But' when replying to something a family member said." Lee argues that if you start a sentence with the word "But," you are telling the other speaker you didn't listen affirmatively to what was said. The word "but" suggests that you are going to refute something, not discuss it. This rule, while difficult to learn, has in my experience significantly helped achieve consensus while, happily, shortening meetings.

A final rule for family meetings is that a chairperson and secretary must be selected for that particular meeting. The chair's role is to facilitate the meeting as one among equals, not to act as if she or he were the traditional chairman of the board. Remember, it's first participation and then consensus the family is seeking to help it in its effort to achieve its mission. The secretary's role is to take the minutes of the meeting and to evaluate and collect comments on the draft minutes following the meeting. I cannot stress strongly enough the need for minutes. Great damage has occurred in many families because a clear record of decisions did not exist. These minutes also serve to preserve the family history and are a critical resource for later generations. Many family advisers suggest rotating these tasks to give all members a chance to learn these important functions. I agree, with the caveat that these roles should be agreed on after the meeting agenda is set so that individuals who will have major reports to make at that meeting are not also charged with one of these responsibilities.

2) For a family's first meeting on governance, each family member should prepare a personal résumé. You probably believe you know just about everything significant about your family members. Let me surprise you by advising you that you're wrong. In my experience family members know very little about each other, and what they do know is seriously dated. Our basic view of other family members is vertical, assaying where he or she fits on the family tree. In my experience, we rarely know more than the general circumstances of anyone in our extended family. Often we aren't even up-to-date on what our siblings or nieces and nephews are doing. The preparation of personal résumés gives each family member a chance to look at who she or he is and then to share that view with the other family members. These résumés should include everything the particular family member believes her or his best friend might know. These résumés, to be truly useful, must go far beyond the schools we attended and jobs we do; they must include the expression of our passions. After all, our passions express our individual pursuits of happiness.

Before family members prepare these résumés I remind them that each is a crucial human asset on the family's balance sheet. I explain that preparation of these résumés will permit the compilation of a human resources inventory so the family will know what its human capital is, and so that the representatives of the family know where in the family to find the expertise they need. Human resources inventories help families to effectively use their human assets in carrying out projects. Too frequently families fail to engage their human assets, which can lead to hurt feelings and to the loss of opportunity to build human and intellectual capital.

I suggest the preparation of résumés take fifteen minutes.

Once the personal résumés are completed and shared, I suggest that each family member, after the meeting, prepare a personal mission statement as a further guide to personal learning. While this is not a required step, it is much easier to prepare a family mission statement when each member is aware of her or his individual mission.

3) Each family member should write the ten values he or she considers most crucial to the family's long-term success. These values are posted on the wall as each member offers his or her list. Through this process the entire family value system is captured and synthesized. Ultimately, the values that reflect family consensus are compiled into a family mission statement. Where the family membership exceeds twenty people, smaller groups compile lists of values and report back to the larger assembly.

Allot twenty minutes of meeting time for family members to present their values.

4) Each family member should write what each would, at the age of 105, tell her or his immediate family had been most important to her or him in life. Within a small group these can be shared orally, and in a larger group archived as a part of the human resources inventory. This exercise elicits long-term thinking about critical family issues and when synthesized offers long-term objectives helpful in the process of creating the family mission statement.

Allot twenty minutes of meeting time for the sharing of these long-term values.

5) Each family member should write a description of the family twenty years hence. This exercise helps family members begin to understand the long-term nature of the process they are undertaking. Allot thirty minutes for presentation of these descriptions.

6) A small committee should write a brief family history.

Place a special emphasis on past family crises and opportunities, on the personalities of famous and infamous ancestors whose impact is still felt, and on past successes and failures in making family decisions. Allot one hour for review of the family history.

7) Finally, the family should create its own government.

In Chapter 1, I discuss the different forms of government history offers to us, and I explain why I believe Aristotle is right that a republic is the best form of governance for human beings. In its first meeting, the family should describe the forms of governance set out by Aristotle in The Politics and then break into groups to discuss which system of governance will best achieve the family's long-term goal of wealth preservation. This gives each member of the family an experience in making government and an understanding of what the members of the Constitutional Convention accomplished in writing the Constitution of the United States. Creating a family mission statement is, above all, an act of governance.