Where a Rose Cannot Grow
In 1824, a Quaker named John Cadbury opened a grocery store in Birmingham, England, and by 1831 he had a factory making drinking chocolate, which he believed was a healthy alternative to alcohol. So...
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In 1824, a Quaker named John Cadbury opened a grocery store in Birmingham, England, and by 1831 he had a factory making drinking chocolate, which he believed was a healthy alternative to alcohol. So...
Anyone who has ever tried to start a fire with nothing but dry grass knows how the story ends. The flame leaps up gorgeous and immediate, roars for a minute, and dies, because there was nothing...
Peter Buffett had the closest possible seat to one of the largest fortunes ever assembled, and his father famously declined to hand it to him. Warren and Susan Buffett's youngest son built a career...
Years ago, on a Forbes television special, two of the richest men alive were asked about their children, and they gave answers that amounted to opposite bets on human nature. The first, a billionaire...
There is a gesture James Hughes performs in rooms full of wealthy families, and it may be the most efficient piece of teaching in the entire literature of family wealth. Hughes is the American lawyer...
Warren Buffett, one of the richest men who has ever lived, describes the foundation of his fortune as a draw he did not enter. "I was born in 1930. I won the ovarian lottery," he says. "I was born in...
Somewhere around the middle of the last century, a fourteen-year-old boy left Cyprus for Africa. He could not speak English. He arrived in South Africa with no money, no education worth the name, and...
There is an old joke, and let us be clear from the first line that it is a joke, told for laughs and not offered as data by anyone. A Jewish mother is walking down the street with her two young sons...
In 1978, two men who had just been fired from a hardware company sat across a table from one of the richest men in America and lost sixty billion dollars over a used car.
Sometime in the years after 1984, a Vietnamese refugee named Mr. Pham needed money he did not have. His mother was in a refugee camp in Thailand, and he wanted to fly her to the United States. He was...
Between 1912 and 1931, more than five thousand schoolhouses rose across the segregated American South, in counties where the law itself was built to keep Black children unlettered. They were plain...
In 1874, in Budapest, a rabbi's family welcomed a son named Erik Weisz. The family emigrated to small-town Wisconsin with almost nothing, and the boy grew up poor, working odd jobs, teaching himself...
Picture an old man in a courtyard in Shanxi province, northern China, sometime in the centuries when that region's merchant families ran the banks of an empire. His name is Hou Xingyu, he is wealthy...
In 1917, in Japan, eight branches of one extended family sat down to merge their soy sauce businesses into a single company. The family had been brewing since the 1600s; the company they formed that...
Somewhere in Hong Kong there is a family document that says, in effect: take a second wife and you lose your board seat. Divorce, and you lose the board seat and the right to ever work in the company...
On the first of August, 1956, in Singapore, five brothers signed a contract. It was not a hasty document. It told the family's story from the beginning: how their father had built a sauce workshop in...
In 1969, in a village in China's Zhejiang province, a man named Lu Guanqiu started an iron workshop with seven people, 4,000 yuan, and 84 square meters of floor. That is roughly the footprint of a...
Somewhere in Seoul, in the years when Samsung was becoming Samsung, a young man sat for the company's recruitment examination. He had an advantage no other candidate in the room could match: his...
When a family business dies, the family almost always tells a one-cause story. The brothers fought. The son was not ready. The manager stole. The market turned. One villain, one wound, one funeral....
There is a sentence buried near the end of a 2013 business book that names, with clinical precision, the reason so many families lose what they built. The book is The Dragon Network: Inside Stories...
In the late 1920s, a young man named Chia Ek Chor left southern China for Bangkok carrying seeds. Not money, not connections worth the name: seeds, to sell to the Chinese immigrant farmers settling...
Around 2004, one of the most successful restaurant founders in America sat down to persuade his wife to give up her job. Not because she was failing at it. Peggy Tsiang Cherng held a doctorate in...
When a family patriarch dies, the family gathers to divide what he left. The land has a title. The house has a deed. The accounts have balances, and if the family was careful, there is a will....
Every wealth culture on earth seems to have written the same proverb. The English say clogs to clogs in three generations. The Americans say shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves. In Uganda and Kenya you will...