See below for additional recommended books from the FOX community. If there is a book you would like to recommend, please let us know by sending FOX an email at info@familyoffice.com. We welcome your recommendations.
FOX Recommended Reading List
Family Office Exchange (FOX) is pleased to present this year’s recommended Book List—a selection of books chosen by the FOX community of ultra-wealthy families, family office executives, and their advisors. These books are listed in alphabetical order and grouped by the following categories:
- Enterprise Family
- Family Learning
- Leadership & Succession
- Business Owners
- Industry Trends
- Investment Strategy
- Philanthropic Impact
- Opportunity and Risk
Enterprise Family |
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Jeff Rogers, 2019, adapted description from Amazon.com
You will leave a legacy for the next generation. Will it include values, virtues, guiding principles, and culture that you have worked hard to instill in your family or business? In Create a Thriving Family Legacy, Jeff Rogers details how you can take a different approach to estate planning. Instead of merely transferring wealth to the next generation, Jeff teaches you how to prepare your heirs with wisdom and values, helping them well into the future.
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Palisades Hudson Financial Group LLC, 2018, adapted description from Amazon.com
In Looking Ahead, the experienced financial advisers at Palisades Hudson Financial Group provide detailed information and practical advice on a broad range of topics, including relationships with adult children, planning for incapacity, the family business, estate planning, gift and estate taxes, life insurance, financing long-term care, investment approaches, philosophy and psychology, retiring abroad, philanthropy, and starting a new business venture.
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John Christianson, 2019, adapted description from Amazon.com
John Christianson, an advisor to many of today’s most successful wealth creators, offers a unique mix of sound advice for those at various stages of wealth creation and guidance on how to examine the meaning and effects of money on every aspect of life. In speaking directly to the needs of a new breed of wealth creators, Christianson explains how to align your values with your wealth, including the ways in which it is earned, managed, and spent, to maximize both wealth and personal fulfillment.
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John S. Soforic, 2018, adapted description from Amazon.com
They dubbed him the Wealthy Gardener due to his vast fortune and his passion for backyard gardening. The silly nickname stuck, and he didn’t object to it. Instead, within a year he renamed his vineyards The Wealthy Gardens. He enjoyed the name because it reminded him of a metaphor comparing life to a plot of land. Gardeners are not afraid of working hard to shape their landscape, but they are also aware of a mysterious Unseen Force that operates behind the scenes to make the plants grow.
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Charles A. Lowenhaupt, 2018, adapted description from Amazon.com
Wealth should never consume or imprison the wealth holder, but it can. This book provides you with solutions to the issues many wealth inheritors encounter, including problems with trust, family wealth secrets, and family legacy.
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Frazer Rice, 2018, adapted description from Amazon.com
The more wealth you have, the more risks to your financial security. But with the right knowledge, planning, and guidance, you can preserve your assets and enjoy them as well. Private wealth manager, Frazer Rice, has seen every challenge and success that the well-off can face. In Wealth, Actually, Frazer shares his holistic, adaptable approach to wealth management. Through a combination of philosophical discussion, practical advice, humor, and anecdotes, he shows how you can determine what you want your wealth to do; communicate with loved ones about your fortune; avoid overspending; handle wealth threats; evaluate, grow, and protect investments; and choose the best advisors.
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Laura A. Roser, 2018, adapted description from Amazon.com
Estate planning traditionally focuses on your financial assets—your stuff. But what about your other assets? Such as your wisdom, values, beliefs, and experiences. These are essential to pass on. In Your Meaning Legacy, non-financial estate planning expert Laura A. Roser reveals a step-by-step approach to cultivating, capturing, and passing on what matters most.
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Family Learning |
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Diana Graber, 2019, adapted description from Amazon.com
The potential threats online, including cyberbullying and online predators, can tempt you to snatch the smartphone or tablet right out of your children’s hands. While avoidance might eliminate the dangers, that approach also means your child misses out on technology’s many benefits and opportunities. Raising Humans in a Digital World shows you how digital kids must learn to navigate this environment through developing social-emotional skills, balancing virtual and real life, building safe and healthy relationships, protecting personal information, identifying and avoiding fake news and questionable content, and becoming positive role models and leaders. This book is packed with at-home discussion topics and enjoyable activities that can be slipped into your daily routine.
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Dr. Kalanit Ben-Ari, 2018, adapted description from Amazon.com
This clear, concise, and easy-to-read book is a wonderful guide for busy parents seeking to parent in a positive and productive way. It provides many suggestions of games and simple tweaks in communication designed to turn conflict into connection, and stressful triggers into playful cooperation between parent and child. Unlike long theoretical books, it is full of practical tips to dip into and apply every day, to help bring calm to your family and home-life, eliminate power struggles with your children, and encourage independence.
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Sarah Mackenzie, 2018, adapted description from Amazon.com
Founder of the immensely popular Read-Aloud Revival podcast, Sarah Mackenzie knows first-hand how reading can change a child’s life. In The Read-Aloud Family, she offers the inspiration and age-appropriate book lists you need to start a read-aloud movement in your own home. From a toddler’s wonder to a teenager’s resistance, Sarah details practical strategies to make reading aloud a meaningful family ritual. Reading aloud also increases your kids’ academic success and fortifies them with the inner strength they need to face life’s challenges.
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Leadership Development and Succession |
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Henry Hutcheson, 2019, adapted description from Amazon.com
If approximately 70 percent of all businesses are family businesses, and two out of three don’t survive to the next generation, what can you do to make sure your business will survive and thrive? Dirty Little Secrets of Family Business comes clean with much-needed information on nitty-gritty issues, such as entitlement, letting employees (even family members) go when they just aren’t working out, compensation, including your kids in the business (when to bring them in, help them move up, and prepare them to take over), shareholder agreements, selecting the next leader, and more. Readers can apply the numerous ideas and tips in this guide to address any family business situation.
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Tamar Milo, Ph.D., 2019, adapted description from Amazon.com
Managing a family business is complex. It has many advantages as well as potential obstacles and problems. Anyone who has ever owned a family business, and especially those who have experienced the transition from the founding generation to their successors, will identify with the hardships and frustration, the things left unsaid, the role of spouses, and the effort required in order to create a true partnership between members of different generations. Dr. Tamar Milo has accompanied many families over the years and now shares the knowledge and experience she has accumulated, in order to help you become stronger as a person and upgrade your family business. Her book, Succeeding at Succession is a unique guide which includes numerous stories of families while providing practical tools for dealing with complexity, which, with the right guidance, can become a powerful springboard for the entire family.
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Marshall Rowe, Jim Fitts, and John Weeks, 2019, adapted description from Amazon.com
Every good business owner has an operational plan—but only 17% create a fully articulated transition strategy. Even then, the focus is usually on monetary and legal concerns, ignoring the important emotional and lifestyle effects of the change. To take on your transition happily, successfully, and securely, you need a holistic plan that incorporates personal, family, and financial concerns. In Your Next Adventure, the team from Harvest Capital shows you how to craft a robust transition strategy that considers your business, personal, family, and community needs. From pre-sale to post-sale, this book will help you plan ahead, assemble the right professional advisors, and incorporate your values, legacy, and loved ones into every choice you make.
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Business Owners |
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Tiffani Bova, 2018, adapted description from Amazon.com
Trying to find the one right move that will improve your business’s performance can feel overwhelming. But, as you’ll discover in Growth IQ, there are ten simple—but easily misunderstood—paths to growth, and every successful growth strategy can be boiled down to picking the right combination and sequence of these paths for your current context. Salesforce growth expert Tiffani Bova travels around the world helping companies solve their most vexing problem: how to keep growing in the face of stiff competition and a fast-changing business environment. She draws on decades of experience and more than thirty fascinating, in-depth business stories to demonstrate the opportunities—and pitfalls—of each of the ten growth paths, how they work together, and how they apply to business today.
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Ben Horowitz, 2018, adapted description from Amazon.com
The time and circumstances in which people were raised often shapes them—yet few leaders have managed to shape their times. In What You Do Is Who You Are, Ben Horowitz, a leading venture capitalist and modern management expert, explains how to make your culture purposeful by spotlighting four models of leadership and culture-building. He offers guidance to help any company understand its own strategy and build a successful culture. Along the way, it answers a question fundamental to any organization: Who are we? How do people talk about us when we’re not around? How do we treat our customers? Are we there for people in a pinch? Can we be trusted? Who you are is not the values you list on the wall. It’s not what you say in company-wide meeting. It’s not your marketing campaign. It’s not even what you believe. Who you are is what you do.
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Industry Trends |
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Neel Mehta, Aditya Agashe, and Parth Detroja, 2017, adapted description from Amazon.com
Some experts say that cryptocurrencies and blockchains are just a scam; others say they’re “the most important invention since the internet.” It’s hard to tell who’s right. Authored by Product Managers from Google, Microsoft, and Facebook, Bubble or Revolution cuts through the hype to offer a balanced, comprehensive, and accessible analysis of blockchains and cryptocurrencies. You’ll learn the core concepts of these technologies and understand their strengths and weaknesses from real-world case studies; dive deep into their technical, economic, political, and legal complexities; and gain insights about their future from exclusive interviews with dozens of tech industry leaders. No coding or math needed.
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Safi Bahcall, 2019, adapted description from Amazon.com
In Loonshots, physicist and entrepreneur Safi Bahcall reveals a surprising new way of thinking about the mysteries of group behavior that challenges everything we thought we knew about nurturing radical breakthroughs. Drawing on the science of phase transitions, Bahcall shows why teams, companies, or any group with a mission will suddenly change from embracing wild new ideas to rigidly rejecting them, just as flowing water will suddenly change into brittle ice. Using examples that range from the spread of fires in forests to the hunt for terrorists online, and stories of thieves and geniuses and kings, Bahcall shows how this new kind of science helps us understand the behavior of companies and the fate of empires. Loonshots distills these insights into lessons for creatives, entrepreneurs, and visionaries everywhere.
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Priya Parker, 2018, adapted description from Amazon.com
At a time when coming together is more important than ever, Parker sets forth a human-centered approach to gathering that will help everyone create meaningful, memorable experiences, large and small, for work and for play. Drawing on her expertise as a facilitator of high-powered gatherings around the world, Parker takes you inside events of all kinds to show what works, what doesn't, and why. She investigates a wide array of gatherings—conferences, meetings, a courtroom, a flash-mob party, an Arab-Israeli summer camp—and explains how simple, specific changes can invigorate any group experience. The result is a book that's both journey and guide, full of exciting ideas with real-world applications. The Art of Gathering will forever alter the way you look at your next meeting, industry conference, dinner party, and backyard barbecue—and how you host and attend them.
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Investment Strategy and Direct Investing |
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Chad Hagan, February 2020, adapted description from Amazon.com
Family offices are currently the most attractive group of investors, and their structure is more permanent than many of the world’s strongest companies. They have a different system of management and investing, a hybrid that combines families directly investing in companies to diversify or to build current portfolios with customized returns on investment, and vastly different investment goals and investment time frames. Through case studies of family offices like the Rockefeller’s “Room 5600,” supported by solid research and statistics from intelligence partners covering family office investing, Global Family Office Investing covers the important direct investment styles of family offices and explains how family office investing works.
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Danielle Town and Phil Town, 2018, adapted description from Amazon.com
In this essential handbook—a blend of Rich Dad, Poor Dad and The Happiness Project—Danielle Town, the co-host of the wildly popular InvestED podcast, shares her yearlong journey learning to invest, as taught to her by her father, investor, and bestselling author Phil Town.
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Philanthropic Impact |
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Raj Kumar, 2019, adapted description from Amazon.com
Drawing on two decades covering global development as editor in chief of Devex, Raj Kumar explores how nontraditional models of philanthropy and aid are empowering the world’s poorest people to make progress. Old aid was driven by good intentions and relied on big-budget projects from a few government aid agencies, like the World Bank and USAID. Today, corporations, Silicon Valley start-ups, and billionaire philanthropists are a disrupting force pushing global aid to be data driven and results oriented. The result is a more sustainable philosophy of aid that elevates the voices of the world’s poor as neighbors, partners, and customers.
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Ann Mei Chang, 2018, adapted description from Amazon.com
Around the world, a new generation is looking beyond greater profits, for meaningful purpose. But, unlike business, few social interventions have achieved significant impact at scale. Inspired by the modern innovation practices popularized by bestseller The Lean Startup that have fueled technology breakthroughs touching every aspect of our lives, Lean Impact turns our attention to a new goal—achieving radically greater social good. Ann Mei Chang brings a unique perspective from across sectors, from her years as a Silicon Valley executive to her most recent experience as Chief Innovation Officer at USAID. She brings the book to life with inspiring stories from interviews spanning more than 200 organizations across the U.S. and around the world
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Opportunity and Risk Management |
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Dr. Steven Deck, 2018, adapted description from Amazon.com
Organizations are under increased pressure to manage risks. Traditionally, risk management responsibility has been delegated to individual operating units. This approach lacks an overarching and comprehensive strategy for managing risks and is being supplanted by an approach gaining favor in board rooms for strategically managing risks now termed enterprise risk management (ERM). However, existing ERM models often lack guidance for implementing ERM in complex organizational settings. This book examines why organizations adopt an ERM strategy and how critical success factors influence its implementation.
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Scott Augenbaum, 2019, adapted description from Amazon.com
There are bad people in the world, and they are on the internet. They want to hurt you. They are based all over the world, so they’re hard at “work” even when you’re sleeping. They use automated programs to probe for weaknesses in your internet security programs. And they never stop. Cybercrimes are a threat and as dangerous as an armed intruder—yet millions of Americans are complacent or simply uninformed of how to protect themselves. The Secret to Cybersecurity closes that knowledge gap by using real-life examples to educate readers. Written by a 29-year veteran of the FBI who specialized in cybercrimes, the book teaches you about the scams, methods, and ways that cyber criminals operate—so you can learn how to keep you, your family, and your business safe.
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