The Liautaud Graduate School of Business at the University of Illinois in Chicago looks, from the outside, like a family's finest hour. Jim Liautaud, a self-made technology entrepreneur, endowed it...
The Liautaud Graduate School of Business at the University of Illinois in Chicago looks, from the outside, like a family's finest hour. Jim Liautaud, a self-made technology entrepreneur, endowed it together with his wife, Gina, and his son Jimmy John, the founder of a sandwich chain that grew to roughly three hundred locations. They gave as a united trio, and the family name went up on a great public institution.
That is the outside. Here is the inside, as Jimmy John told it to Judy Martel. When his father first raised the gift, it was already a done deal. "I was caught completely off guard," he recalled. "I felt wronged." His father was giving away what the son had grown up assuming was, in some part, his: "Somebody else was getting the mother lode." He fought it privately, lost, and only then put in money of his own, because, as he put it, the train was out of the station. His rawest version of the feeling is worth quoting in full, because every founder should hear how a generous gift can land on an heir: "Not only is he kicking us out of the nest, he's taking our dough and giving it to someone else and we're saying, 'hey, wait, what about us; we're trying to build our own nests?'"
It took Jimmy John until his forties to make peace with the gift. "I'm in a different place now than I was a few years ago," he says; the neediness of his twenties and thirties had given way to something less judgmental, and he came to understand his father's motives. But mark the accounting. The reconciliation took two decades, and it arrived by luck of maturity, not by anything the family did. A gift meant to crown the family's legacy opened a rift in it, and the rift was not caused by the giving. It was caused by the announcing.
The story sits at the center of the philanthropy chapter of Martel's 2006 book The Dilemmas of Family Wealth: Insights on Succession, Cohesion, and Legacy (Bloomberg Press), her study of the eight dilemmas that undo wealthy families across generations. The chapter's argument, which this essay carries into our own households, is simple to state and hard to live: a family can agree completely that generosity matters and still be torn apart by a gift, if the founder builds the gift alone and presents it to the family as news.
Why do generous founders get blindsided? Because the family rarely objects to their face, and because the founder's own motives are more mixed than they feel from the inside. James Hughes, the veteran family-wealth counselor who wrote the book's foreword, delivers the diagnosis with a lawyer's lack of anesthesia. When a founder decides to leave his estate to charity, Hughes says, "this is an act of hubris because it perpetuates him forever," and others in the family may struggle to fund his immortality with what they regarded as theirs. Then he adds the observation decades of practice gave him: "I have never known a wife to agree with her husband on this plan if she could find a way to head him off. Mothers do not like to benefit others ahead of their broods."
Two honesty notes on that quotation. First, Hughes is generalizing from his own clientele, wealthy American families of a particular era, and his gendered framing (the giving patriarch, the resisting mother) is his pattern, not a law; take it as one practitioner's field report. Second, the word hubris is doing careful work, and it should not be sanded off. Hughes is not calling generosity vanity. He is pointing at the tangle inside it: a founder's charitable monument serves the world and the founder's name at the same time, and the family can see both motives clearly even when the founder sees only one. That is why, as Martel observes, there is often "a powerful dissenting urge" in the family to keep the fortune, "and the founder is often unaware of this." The silence around the dinner table is not agreement. It is the same silence that precedes every contested will: people swallowing objections they will act on later, or resent forever.
The Liautaud story shows the mechanism exactly. Jim Liautaud did nothing wrong by wanting to give; his son ultimately honored him for it. What failed was sequence. The decision was complete before the conversation began, so the only roles left for the family were applause or betrayal. Any dissent, however legitimate, was instantly disloyalty. That is what announcement does: it converts family members from co-authors into audience, and an audience that feels robbed does not clap.
The book's counter-model comes from a century earlier. Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish immigrant who built America's steel industry, held the conviction, quoted by Martel, "that a rich man who dies rich dies in disgrace." He acted on it at world scale after selling his company in 1901: some three thousand free public libraries worldwide, Carnegie Hall in New York, the university that became Carnegie-Mellon, endowments so deep that, as Martel notes, generations of preschoolers have watched Sesame Street on the steel money without knowing it. And the family? "None of Andrew Carnegie's fifty or so descendents inherited vast amounts of capital," Martel writes, "but his legacy is rich in philanthropic culture." Third and fourth generations of such families, she observes, speak with pride about the charitable endeavors of their forebears.
Set Carnegie beside the Liautaud dinner table and the puzzle sharpens. Carnegie gave away almost everything and his descendants inherited pride. Jim Liautaud gave away one gift and his son felt robbed. The difference is not the amount, and it is not the heirs' character. It is whether the giving was a shared family identity or a founder's private project revealed late. Carnegie published his creed for decades before he executed it; nobody in his family could mistake the libraries for an impulse. The gift that causes a rift is almost never the one the family saw coming and grew up inside. It is the one that arrives as a surprise, carrying the unspoken message: I decided this without you.
Martel says it plainly: when philanthropy comes as a surprise, the founder must wait, sometimes decades, for the next generation to age into understanding, exactly as Jimmy John did. The alternative is to stop producing surprises.
So what does building the gift with the family look like, at a scale any household can copy? Martel's best answer costs almost nothing and comes from the counselor Thayer Willis and her husband, who noticed that both of them had grown up wealthy but excluded: "We were always considered to be children, even when we were adults," Willis says of her own upbringing, "and not competent enough to be included in any decisions." They resolved to raise their own children opposite. When the children were 8 and 12, the family began a tradition: every January 1st, each member of the family, including Willis's mother, receives the identical sum of money, theirs to give away. Each person researches and champions a cause, and part of each share can go to the causes the others have chosen, which, in Willis's words, encourages family members to "sell" their charitable ideas to the family. Then they set a date and discuss the choices together.
Watch what the children did with a small amount of real authority. Clay, eight years old, decided children should not go hungry and chose the Oregon Food Bank. "I helped him with his research, but I let him lead the way," says Willis. His class later took a field trip to the same food bank, and he spent a day filling bags of food where his own money had gone. "He got to work for a day where he donated," Willis says. "What a great gift." His preteen sister, Julianne, went further afield. After a mission organization visited their church, she researched on her own and chose health and education programs in Armenia. "We said, 'Really? How did you choose that?'" recalls Willis. The girl had worked out her own theory of change, which Willis relays: if you can get healthy, you can get an education; and if you can do that, you can get a job.
The money involved was small. What the family manufactured was not. "One of the best parts was seeing how competent our children are at identifying their values and extending those values into the world," Willis says. "We saw qualities in the children that we never saw before." And the tradition buys something priceless for later: as Willis notes, children raised inside the family's giving never have to wonder, in adulthood, whether the parents are giving away their inheritance behind their backs. The suspicion that ambushed Jimmy John at forty never gets to form, because giving was never something the founder did to the family. It was something the family did.
Ellen Remmer's family shows the adult version. After her father died and the family sold his business, Remmer, her mother, and her two sisters felt something missing from all the financial talk: "A couple of us felt that what was missing from our talks was a social impact for the money." They founded a family foundation for disadvantaged girls, deliberately starting small so everyone could agree. Remmer describes the founding trustees' years together as "just this wonderful cocoon," and says the foundation gave the family "a healing process" after the strain of selling the business, when they had to learn to work together without the patriarch as anchor. A foundation is a US legal vehicle; the healing is not. What the Remmers actually built was a table where a grieving family practiced deciding together, with generosity as the agenda. That table can be built in any country, with or without the paperwork.
Now the translation, because this dilemma is not foreign to us. It may be more at home in African family life than anywhere else. Ours are giving cultures already: the harambee, the church building fund, the pledge announced from the front bench, the school fees quietly paid for half the village's children. Generosity is not something we need to import from Carnegie. But the failure pattern in this chapter, the gift announced rather than built, has a familiar local costume: the founder who stands up in church and pledges the new roof while his own children are behind on tuition; the matriarch who promises land to the congregation without a word to the heirs who farm it; the brother abroad who funds a borehole for the town and is stunned that his siblings, still crowded in the old house, are bitter rather than proud. In each case the family hears the same message Jimmy John heard: somebody else is getting the mother lode, and you found out with the rest of the audience.
The book stops at the American foundation office. We go one step further. In cultures where giving is public and honor-laden, the private family conversation must come first precisely because the public announcement is so binding. A pledge made before the congregation cannot be walked back without shame, which means the family was never really consulted, only informed of what their inheritance had already promised. The founder who gathers his household before pledge Sunday, lays out what he intends, hears the objections, and adjusts, loses nothing but surprise, and surprise was never the honorable part. What he gains is a family that stands behind the pledge instead of beneath it.
This is Legacy Statement work in LegacyPot: a written record, in the founder's own voice, of what the family gives, why, in what order, and how the balance between the family's needs and the family's generosity was struck, so that the reasoning is inherited along with the commitments.
Here is the one thing to do before your next act of generosity, large or small.
Reverse the order. Decide nothing publicly that the family has not heard privately first. If a significant gift is forming in your mind, a pledge, an endowment, a harambee commitment, a bequest to the church or the school, bring it to the family while it is still a draft: what you want to give, why it matters to you, what it will mean for what they receive. Let them question it. Expect the dissent Hughes promises, welcome it into the open where it can be answered, and let the final shape carry their fingerprints.
Then, this January or this term, start the smallest version of the Willis tradition your household can afford: the same modest sum to every member, each one researching and championing a cause, each one selling it to the others at one family meal. Record what everyone chose and why in your Legacy Statement. Do it for ten years and your children will never stand where Jimmy John stood, blindsided at the announcement of their own family's kindness. They will be the ones making the announcement, together, with you.
A rich man who dies rich may die in disgrace. But a founder who gives alone risks the quieter disgrace: a monument with the family name on it, and a family no longer on speaking terms beneath it. Build the gift together. That is the version of your name worth engraving.