Is being treated equally the same as being treated fairly? How a family will answer this question is key. Only then can a family work on their definition of fairness and equality. And only then can they mitigate the potential chaos that can ensue around this topic.

Preparing the next generation of family members is the best investment a family can make if they want their legacy to continue. Family continuity and wealth preservation strategies, that lack a solid education agenda will most likely fail to deliver. Teaching your family members to become responsible wealth owners is the most effective way.

How can the next generation become leaders in their families? What can the family gain from this? What can the NextGen gain from it? Do you even want to lead? If you do, where and how would you like to lead?

During conflict, it is hard to maintain your energy levels and reach the results you strive for. Getting it right is the art of conflict management.

The secret ingredient to family business success is productive conflict. We can turn conflict into an opportunity with the right mindset and processes. While it is a key ingredient for success it is also the number one reason for wealth loss.

The dynamics in business families can be traumatizing for young children and these traumas will carry on into adulthood. In adulthood, the effects lead to certain behaviours and toxic dynamics in the family, which can put the family’s wealth at risk. Understanding trauma and working through it is the basis of broken families finding a way to come together again.

Every family has to deal with succession planning in some form or another. By using Design Thinking the succession planning process can be enhanced to reap better results. Design Thinking puts the involved family members at the center of the process and evolves around their needs.

We all know it, the sinking feeling we get once we realize that we have made a mistake. Reflecting mistakes and failures has brought me to a few conclusions on how to grow and learn from them, which I am sharing with you today.

Christmas is coming up and we are all in preparation for it. It is the most wonderful time of the year. And overall, it’s the time of year when we get together with our loved ones and celebrate. Well lets have a look at reality!

Crisis response or crisis management team is a term well known to many of us. In my opinion, every company needs one. But do we know what this term means and what the purpose of these teams is?

We all have our habits - good habits and bad habits. Habits are enormously helpful when used to your advantage. When I am successful at something, I can nail it down to my habit culture. Let’s have a look at habits and deconstruct this wonderful tool.

How well you have defined and set your boundaries will influence every aspect of your life. How you make decisions, how you behave, how you feel and how you perform are directly proportionate to your boundary setting skills. But what are boundaries?

We have all experienced “gut feeling” before. Should we follow it and what exactly is it?

Viktor Frankl is the founder of Logotherapy, which focuses on one’s purpose in life as the central pillar for healing. “Man’s search for meaning” is his most read book.

In a crisis one will face multiple challenges. A lot of these challenges present themselves as paradoxes - a problem that has two opposite forces. If you solve one side of the problem, the other gets worse and vice versa. What do you do then? Isn’t this hopeless?

Your resources are scarce, and you are under immense time pressure. Your peers have already declared you are/your business is done for. What are you left with? You are left with yourself and that is where managing your own personal reseources comes in. The better you do this, the better you are equiped to face anything that life throws at you.

Miyamoto Musashi was a famous swords man and martial artist who lived in the years 1584 to 1645. Back then he was unrivalled in the realm of martial arts and revolutionized the art of fighting with the sword. In his last year just before dying he wrote the “Book of 5 Rings”, which is a manuscript of how to use his martial arts. He does not only describe martial arts on a technical level, but also from a spiritual and a psychological standpoint. There is an immense amount one can learn from this book - especially for strategic thinking and outmanoeuvring your opponent and in anything where you might have to “fight” against somebody.

In the Stanford Design Thinking Process one out of the 5 stages of the design process is called “Define”. This stage highlights the importance of defining a problem, in order to solve it. Usually in product design you will do this with a problem definition followed by a product specification. The same applies to a crisis. In order to solve a crisis, you first need to define the crisis.

In 2015-2018 I had the privilege to manage a crisis in our family business. In his article I share my top learnings from this experience and hope that this will help many in the current situation.

Unless you are a one-man show – and often even then, you will have to engage in choosing partners for you ventures. This is even more important than choosing your employees, as splitting up with a business partner usually comes with great difficulty (such as legals proceedings). Now the next question would be, what to look at? From my own experience, my family history and from many stories I have heard from current partners or mentors, we will cover some of the important points. As Warren Buffet says: “You cannot make a good deal with a bad person.”