ORGANIZED COURSES
Our organized courses offer recommended reading from books available in our Raffles Legacy and Learning site, a substantial Coursebook specific to the topic addressed and course content containing key questions, short introductory readings, summaries of e-lessons, video e-lesson access, examples and templates for you to complete, and an
end-of-module checklist.
In each course, attention is paid to both the ‘hard’ (technical) and ‘soft’ (people-related) issues that require addressing for you to get the best possible outcome from your engagement with the particular coursework at hand.
Courses are offered in three different formats:
Foundation Courses
These courses contain an introduction and between 4-7 modules, provide basic information on critical topics.
These courses are shorter in length than either Core Courses or MasterClasses, and can be pursued as standalone exercises or combined with other courses to expand on
the material addressed.
The Foundations of Legacy course is included here as it provides a common foundation to all other course, ensuring that all strategies and plans reflect appropriate understanding and guidance from the content on family history, culture, challenges, purpose, vision and values.
Core Courses
These courses are approximately 8-10 modules in length and provide information and opportunities for you to develop your own strategies in specific areas within the four key areas described below.
MasterClass Courses
These are the most advanced and comprehensive courses with between 12-16 modules in each course.
They provide a ‘deep dive’ into material which ensures that you have a chance to understand, and apply, the information and guidance necessary to work through your own issues.
The courses here fall broadly into four related areas:
- Integrated Legacy Strategy, including the essential course in the Foundations of Legacy, which is a necessary precursor to virtually every other course on this site.
- Family Organization, Governance, Leadership and Succession, along with those aspects of the family enterprise that can have a particularly positive impact on family unity
and ‘togetherness’ - Family Business Ownership and Strategy
- Family Wealth Management
For each of these four topic areas there is one Foundation Course, three Core Courses and one MasterClass.
These broad course headings and course listing are reflected in the blue course listings ‘tiles’ as set out on the home page. The first column of course listings includes those related to Integrated Legacy Strategy, the second column those related to Family Organization, Governance, Leadership and Succession, the third Family Business, and the final column containing courses related to Family Wealth Management.
Examples of Introductory Material and Courses
Overview and Orientation (Free and Open Access)
Statement of Purpose and Introduction to the Raffles Legacy Learning Center
Our ultimate purpose is to help you to create a better future for you and your family.
Far too often, due to a lack of knowledge, family leaders take decisions – or fail to take the decisions when needed – that can have an unexpectedly negative impact on the future of their families.
The track record of wealthy families, even the most famous, is not universally encouraging.
Comparing the list of the wealthiest American families more than a century ago (three generations in today’s terms), not one of the fabled ‘Gilded Era’ families are still on the list, or even anywhere near the top of the list of current wealthiest families. While still remembered for their business, social, philanthropic and other contributions, these great families may have a better past than future along many critical legacy dimensions.
The Legacy Strategy Framework and Initial Assessment of Your Own Situation
Unlike a health check, which may involve complicated tests and analyses, a family wealth check to see whether or not your family could benefit from an investment in family strategy is simple, easy and painless. All that is required, no matter how wealthy your family, is a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer to three basic questions:
Do you have a clear and documented strategy to preserve and enhance your family wealth – in all its dimensions – across future generations?
Do all relevant members of the family understand and support that strategy?
Are you implementing that strategy successfully?
If your answer to these three questions is affirmative, you are among the very small minority of families who have properly addressed this important family issue. You should be firmly congratulated for having an effective family
wealth strategy in place.
Foundation Courses
Foundations of Legacy: Family History, Culture, Purpose, Vision and Values
“Lend me the stone strength of the past and I will lend you the wings of the future”
– Robinson Jeffers
A deep understanding of the family – past, present and aspirations for the future – is a critical foundation stone for every aspect of legacy strategy, and an essential precondition to every course in this e-learning platform. This Foundation of Legacy course will provide the first step in addressing Integrated Legacy Strategy, Family Governance, Leadership and Succession, Family Wealth Management, Family Dynamics and every other Foundation, Core and MasterClass Course presented here. This course begins with defining who the family is – traditionally defined as bloodline descendants and adopted children of a defined individual or couple – but may also include other criteria such as being a shareholder in a family business, and may or may not include in-laws and stepchildren. How far back in generations a family goes in defining itself will have a major impact on the size of the current and future family as defined, which can have a major impact on family wealth and legacy planning.
Newly Rich: Managing the Risks and Opportunities of First Generation Wealth
“What do you do, and how do you begin, when you have created or received a substantial amount of wealth for the first time?”
This quandary is surprisingly common among those who have created or inherited, but not yet figured out how to manage, a great financial fortune. This sudden wealth can come about through many sources: professional success, business sale, lottery win, inheritance or divorce settlement, to name but a few of the most common.
Many successful business owners or other ‘suddenly wealthy’ individuals have not had the time, training, and exposure to put together a clear legacy plan for themselves and their families. Others may not have had the interest or aptitude to develop the skills necessary to learn how to manage a financial fortune, much less an enduring family legacy. The key steps in that plan are as follows:
- Define your new vision of the future and supporting values
- Decide on your future philosophy of wealth, and then structure and manage your wealth as appropriate
- Establish a disciplined and professional approach to wealth management
- Organise and educate the whole family, with a focus on NextGen leaders
The Essence of Successful Family Business Strategy
”All men can see the tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.”
– Sun Tzu
Legacy families with existing core businesses have an extra dimension to consider in order to build a successful future for the overall family enterprise.
There are many possible advantages to family businesses when compared to their publicly listed competitors, including the opportunity to take calculated risk, foster innovation, encourage entrepreneurial behavior and take a longer term perspective with regard to investment and management planning.
Understand and maximise the benefits of a family business. Apply a detailed model driven by three integrated stages of diagnosis, design and implementation. Learn to apply ‘best practice’ from the past, but also to surface and apply ‘next practice’ as well: the lessons and principles that will create success in a future world very different from the one we see
in front of us today.
Getting Started: An Introduction and Primer on Family Finance and Investment
‘If you don’t control your wealth, it will control you…’
Many essential life skills are not taught in schools and can fail to get the attention they deserve in a busy home. Basic knowledge, such as the organization of family finances, an operating budget, structured approach to investment and wealth management, business leadership, philanthropy and risk management, is essential in a legacy family.
Managing family finances and wealth on a planned and purposeful basis begins at home, and the approach taken to managing basic family finances, savings and investment can serve as both a model and lesson in how to organize and manage greater family wealth later in life.
For younger members of the family, preparing a student budget (as offered here) can begin the journey to responsible stewardship of personal and family wealth over time.
Core Courses
Family Wealth and Legacy Planning: Turning a Financial Fortune into an Enduring Family Legacy
In every course, lesson and insight across this site, the role and contribution of leadership cannot be overstated.
Yet the kind of leadership required to diagnose, design and implement the most effective strategies for a legacy family differs in many ways from other forms of modern leadership models.
Mastering family leadership challenges in a legacy family setting requires defining and addressing all of the issues of a complex family – both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ – in a rapidly changing context. It requires investing the time and effort to develop an understanding of the changes taking place in the world surrounding the family as well as the evolution of the family itself, it requires long term thinking when many strategic cycles are getting shorter and shorter, and it involves identifying and implementing both proven ‘best practices’ from the past and creative new ‘next practices’ for the future.
The Family Office and Supporting Ecosystem
“No man is an island entire of himself.”
Family offices are uniquely suited to integrate the broad expertise and advice that is necessary for the long-term benefit of the families they serve. A family office traditionally addresses wealth structuring; financial, tax and wealth management; legal services; family governance; risk management; communication and education plans. They may also provide family business support and concierge services, such as property management, art collection curation, security and travel.
Because of its close relationship with the family, a family office can help with sensitive family matters, such as conflict avoidance, dispute resolution, generational transitions and leadership succession.
But no family office, no matter how expert, operates on its own. The same is true for a legacy family. Surrounding the family and its family office is a complex eco-system of employees, friends, advisors, institutions and other sources of guidance and practical support on matters great and small. Understanding and managing both the family office and ecosystem are critical elements to the long term of a family.
Family Business: Achieving Excellence in Ownership, Leadership, Governance and Responsibility
‘A good company delivers excellent products and services; a great one delivers excellent products and services and strives to make the world a better place.’
— Bill Ford Chairman, Ford Motor Company
Ever-increasing pressure on businesses to pursue and report on their Corporate Social Responsibility (‘CSR’) objectives in a transparent manner adds to the momentum – and range of potential opportunities in this area. Clients, end customers and regulators are all increasing demands for responsible business practices, ethically sourced products, and insisting on assurances regarding the entire supply chain from their suppliers – even beyond the part they actually control. NGOs risk As the negative impact of climate change accelerates, diversity and equality issues become more visible, and as workplace safety concerns rise, companies now face the need to manage, and report on, a series of both internal and external issues. Increasingly, measurable performance in these areas is being required in order to comply with Global Reporting Initiatives and International Financial Reporting Standards.
Asset Structuring and the Principles of Wealth Preservation
“…Our wish is that…[there be] maintained that state of property, equal or unequal, which results to every man from his own industry or that of his fathers…” – Thomas Jefferson
There are countless reasons why individual families lose their wealth, but many of them can be avoided with careful structuring of wealth, and putting in place proven practices to protect the wealth once properly structured.
On and offshore structures, effective oversight, prudent investment policies, an ‘ecosystem worthy of trust’ and clear principles on wealth distribution and family education can all go a long way to helping you beat the old curse of riches to rags in three generations.
Clarifying the family’s philosophy of wealth, defining a purposeful approach to pools of wealth and protecting wealth from internal and external risks are essential steps to realize legacy objectives and achieve the broader family purpose.
The Renaissance Leadership Imperative: Mastering and Integrating the Disciplines of Our Time
In every course, lesson and insight across this site, the role and contribution of leadership cannot be overstated. Yet the kind of leadership required to diagnose, design and implement the most effective strategies for a legacy family differs in many ways from other forms of modern leadership models. Mastering family leadership challenges in a legacy family setting requires defining and addressing all of the issues of a complex family – both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ – in a rapidly changing context. It requires investing the time and effort to develop an understanding of the changes taking place in the world surrounding the family as well as the evolution of the family itself, it requires long term thinking when many strategic cycles are getting shorter and shorter, and it involves identifying and implementing both proven ‘best practices’ from the past and creative new ‘next practices’ for the future.
The Renaissance Imperative
The successful example of the vaunted ‘Renaissance Man’ of the Enlightenment period, in many ways, captured the ethos underlying the model best suited to inform and guide leaders of modern legacy families in mastering the challenges they face today, and those they will need to address tomorrow as well.
Seven Principles of Success for Leaders of Legacy Families
1. Aspire and seek actively to improve on what is currently there
2. Master and integrate the disciplines of your time
3. Apply the highest levels of creativity and innovation
4. Take a holistic approach
5. Do not be afraid to end the old to make way for the new
6. Benefit from the wisdom and capabilities of others
7. Provide authentic leadership in a manner which inspires trust and engenders support
Family Dynamics: Culture, Conflicts, Relationships and Individual Issues
‘A hero is someone who does what he can’
– Anatole France
For many families and their leaders, there is a strong sense that the future of the family and all of the elements of its enterprise – the family and its governance, operating business, financial investments, philanthropy, and the other elements which make up the full presence and influence of the family – will be shaped by a combination of factors arising from both within and outside of the family.
The internal aspects of family strategy are developed in great detail in many of the lessons and courses available on this e-learning site. Yet merely addressing the internal family issues within our areas of immediate control and influence will not be enough to maximise our contributions to creating the best possible future for our families across as many generations
as possible.
Good Governance: Addressing Board Structure, Composition, Leadership and Performance
“Global market forces will sort out those companies that do not have sound corporate governance.”
— Mervyn King
Numerous studies have shown the correlation of good governance with better decision-making, stronger financial performance and more effective risk management and sustainability practices. The role of governance, along with good ownership, leadership, management, succession and strategy, can be essential to the long-term health and prosperity of legacy families. This extends to their various family and philanthropic activities, their businesses, and other commercial and non-commercial initiatives around the world.
Good governance in the greater family enterprise addresses those structures, policies and practices that have proven successful in the past, and ensures they evolve to stay relevant and effective in the future as well. This will benefit from a focused effort to set out the purpose of a board and its related activities, define its structure and operations, provide guidance to its leadership and put in place an approach to objective review and constant performance improvement.
Sustainable and Impact Investing: Policies and Metrics for Success
With each passing year, more and more wealthy families become sensitive to great challenges to the impact consumption, business and investment have on the world’s environmental, social and governance challenges.
In response, responsible investing has moved on from traditional negative screens on such industrial sectors as tobacco, alcohol and firearms to a more comprehensive and effective approach to investing with a measured impact
on their ‘ESG’ impact.
Today, while still using negative screens, many families are embracing a more comprehensive set of values, practices, and approaches that contribute to a more holistic and proactive approach to principled investing, which also aligns a family ’s investment practices more firmly with its core values and beliefs.
A Broader Engagement : Stepping Up to the Responsibilities and Opportunities of Wealth
‘A hero is someone who does what he can’
-Anatole France
For many families and their leaders, there is a strong sense that the future of the family and all of the elements of its enterprise – the family and its governance, operating business, financial investments, philanthropy, and the other elements which make up the full presence and influence of the family – will be shaped by a combination of factors arising from both within and outside of the family.
The internal aspects of family strategy are developed in great detail in many of the lessons and courses available on this e-learning site. Yet merely addressing the internal family issues within our areas of immediate control and influence will not be enough to maximise our contributions to creating the best possible future for our families across as many generations
as possible.
Generational Transitions: Preparing the Rising Generation to Master the Challenges of the Future
Generational transitions in most families now take place every 30 years or so, given modern family patterns. Any such change initiative will benefit from the family having established a firm foundation in unifying culture, effective governance and leadership succession plans and family communications long before the three phases of transition and succession begin:
- Phase I: Where the current leadership is in place and NextGen members are preparing for their future roles
- Phase II: Where the current leadership generation are still present and engaged in some areas within the family enterprise, but the process of transitioning to new ownership and leadership has begun, a phase of both stepping up by NextGen and stepping down by retiring members of both generations
- Phase III: When the NextGen are in full control of all ownership ad leadership responsibilities
Making a Difference: Effective Philanthropy and Social Engagement
Philanthropy can be the glue that binds an extended family together, and a cornerstone of a family’s multi-generational legacy.
Modern families have changed their approach to philanthropic and societal initiatives. The historical approach of passive “checkbook philanthropy” and bequeathing assets is being replaced by an active, engaged and diverse method
of “giving while living”.
Modern philanthropy offers a wide range of opportunities for families to fund activities and actively engage in initiatives. Philanthropic families can make an impact on the world through the causes they support.
Family Risk and Crisis Management
Risk management is all about identifying potential family problems early and addressing them quickly and effectively.
Traditional risks include family, financial, fiscal and physical risks. Today data and cybersecurity concerns have added an extra dimension to risk management. Responses to priority risks can range from assuring the physical security of real assets to prenuptial agreements to complex financial market hedging instruments.
MasterClass Courses
Integrated Family Wealth, Business and Legacy StrategyTM
“Hope is not a strategy”
This MasterClass course shows you how to set and achieve aspirational plans to beat the historical odds of “riches to rags in three generations”.
Very few wealthy families around the world have been able to preserve their financial wealth for more than three generations.
Many legacy families do not yet have a clear strategy to protect their wealth and enhance their legacies, perhaps because there was, until now, no opportunity available for their leaders to develop and implement their strategies with expert support.
An Advanced Approach to Family Governance, Leadership and Succession
“Leading from the heart of the family, not just the head of the table.”
Most leading families who are able to preserve their family wealth and harmony across generations have a structured approach to family governance, leadership and succession.
This course takes you through proven insights and practical lessons to help you define and implement a unique approach to these fundamental matters.
Business Strategy: Improving Results and Increasing Value
This course provides a firm conceptual grounding in the core concepts of business strategy and the possibility to create your own strategy on a step-by-step basis.
That strategy will be captured in a set of clear and simple slides common to all good business strategies, along with the possibility to include additional material you wish to include which is specific to your own business or provides greater depth in particular areas of business strategy and tactics. These additions may include such items as R&D focus, detailed customer segmentation, pricing initiatives, New Business Development plans, technology breakthroughs, compensation plans, specific competitive competitor contra-plans, cost reduction initiatives, and other elements of importance for your business.
Upon completion of this course you will have a deeper understanding of what makes a strategy successful, and a comprehensive strategy for your own business. This state-of-the-art strategy will address both the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ elements contributing to your successful business strategy – documented and available for use to solicit input, communicate direction and engage all relevant constituencies to support the high level goals and practical tasks required to make the strategy successful.
Total Family Wealth: Integrating Portfolio Business Property and Private Investment
‘We cannot build our own future without helping others to build theirs’
While the purpose and focus of this e-learning initiative are on the wealthy family itself, we are aware that the quality of advice and training for those who serve them are an important element in their success.
To that end, programs for professional advisors are available to prepare professionals for a career in advising wealthy families, to support their continuing education, and to stay current by meeting the educational demands of their professional associations and regulatory bodies.
Bankers, brokers, lawyers, counsellors, accountants, trustees and others whose work can be improved by adding to their knowledge and capabilities are welcome to sign up for a combination of lessons, courses or custom-crafted learning programs best suited to serve their, and their clients’, needs. Modules and documents currently under development and will be available during 2022.