"The members of the Chase family have been in the jewelry business for 92 years, and we want the benefits of the business, and the values of our family, to be perpetuated in the future." So opens a...
"The members of the Chase family have been in the jewelry business for 92 years, and we want the benefits of the business, and the values of our family, to be perpetuated in the future." So opens a family charter reproduced in full in Dennis T. Jaffe's Working with the Ones You Love: Conflict Resolution and Problem Solving Strategies for a Successful Family Business (Conari Press, 1990), and before we spend an essay on it, honesty requires one thing said immediately: the Chase family does not exist. Jaffe, a clinical psychologist who consulted to families in business for decades, states in his introduction that his case families carry fictitious names, marked with quote marks, with details altered to protect real clients, and he presents the "Chase" charter explicitly as a hypothetical example, an elaborate model fitted to a large third-generation firm.
Why build an essay on a document signed by nobody? Because it is the rarest thing in the family-wealth literature: a complete, copyable template. Thousands of books tell families to align on values and plan succession. Jaffe's book shows the finished artifact, every clause, and, more valuable still, the assembly process that produces it: a fixed sequence of four documents, built in a specific order, through meetings with rules you can follow this year. Most of what is written about family harmony is sermon. This is mechanics, and mechanics are what this essay extracts: the four documents, the order, the retreat method that builds them, and what the finished charter actually covers. One more honesty note before we start: the book contains no African family, business, or proverb anywhere in its pages, so the African applications near the end are our translation, and we will say so when we get there.
Jaffe's institutional answer to family conflict is the Family Council: not a single meeting but a standing, recurring forum, "an ongoing process that formalizes informal exchange among family members." Its job is to produce and keep reconciling three linked plans, individual plans for each member's life and career, a family plan for the whole, and a business plan, on the grounds that no one can make the first without knowing the other two. A son cannot plan his own future without knowing whether he can expect a share of the business or the family's backing to start his own.
The Council's work is captured in four documents, and Jaffe is insistent about the sequence: a Family Business History, then a Values Credo, then a Mission Statement, then the Family Charter. The order looks bureaucratic and is actually psychological. Each document is impossible to write honestly until the one before it exists. You cannot legislate rules (charter) until you have agreed what you are trying to achieve (mission). You cannot state a shared purpose until you know what the family actually values (credo), as opposed to what it assumes it values. And you cannot surface true values until the family has heard its own story told whole (history), because the values live inside the story: why the founder left the village or the old country, what the first loan cost, which brother was wronged. Families that skip straight to charter-drafting, and most impatient founders want to, produce documents with no roots, agreed to politely and ignored completely.
The history comes first, and Jaffe's staging of it is specific. The oldest generation tells the story of the business at length, several hours, sometimes across sessions, ideally with an interviewer, and the telling should be recorded on video, so that founders now old can be heard by grandchildren now young. His questions: what were their dreams, how did they get started, where did the first money come from, what stages did the business pass through. And his standard for the telling is the line worth framing: "The point is not to eulogize, idealize or sanitize the story, but to convey its reality." He notes that founders assume a kind of genetic memory, believing their children simply know the story; they do not, and the children have usually learned not to ask.
From the history and the credo, the family drafts its Mission Statement, and here Jaffe hands over the most quotable standard in the book. The statement should be short, "not more than 100 words," and it should be emotionally moving, or, as his consulting partner put it, it should "give you goosebumps." It should express, he writes, "your deepest, most important purpose."
Both halves of that standard are doing real work. The hundred-word ceiling forces the family to choose; a mission that lists everything protects nothing. The goosebumps test is a fraud detector: if the draft reads like it was copied from a bank's lobby wall, it is not yours, and nobody will consult it in a hard year. Jaffe warns that good statements cannot be produced in one sitting; draft at the retreat, then let it rest a month, invite proposed changes, and expect real controversy, since competing answers to "does the business or the family come first" will surface here for the first time. He also insists the finished mission be shared beyond the family, with employees who may sharpen it, because a mission kept secret is a slogan, and, in his phrase, formulating a mission "is a process, not a slogan to hang on the wall."
For calibration he reproduces one working example, a family and business mission fused into four sentences: a business about service, to family, employees, customers, and community, growing so that everyone has a secure home base. Under a hundred words, plain, and specific enough to feel like one particular family. That is the target.
The documents are drafted at family retreats, and this is where Jaffe's book earns its keep, because he specifies the machinery most authors leave vague. Two of his disguised composite families, the "Rogers" and "Ryan" families, are walked through real retreat sequences, and the mechanics travel.
The room is arranged so everyone can see everyone: chairs or pillows in a circle, flip charts, and open wall space, because the walls become the family's shared working memory. Ground rules for behavior are agreed at the start and, in Jaffe's instruction, "displayed in writing on the wall," his examples being no interrupting and no sarcasm. Notes and minutes are kept "by rotating scribes," so the record belongs to no single faction and agreements can be followed up. Sessions are bounded, a morning block and a shorter afternoon one, with generous free time, meals, and play, because the barbecue and the sailing are not breaks from the work; they are the reason the work survives.
Two mechanics deserve special attention. The first is silence before sharing. Jaffe's vision exercise instructs each person to begin alone: sit quietly, let the mind wander over how family and business would look in an ideal future, without judgment, and only afterward write down key elements and share them. Reflection precedes discussion, so the quietest member arrives with something already formed, instead of watching the loudest member set the agenda. The Ryan family extended this backward in time: before their three-day retreat, each of the eleven participants wrote a letter to the family stating personal goals, needs, and concerns, and all letters were shared in advance. The second is making thought visible. At the Ryan retreat the family filled in a genogram, a diagram of the family tree, while telling its history; visions went up on paper around the walls; and values were sorted physically, each person ranking their most deeply held values with one value per post-it note, then sticking the ranked sets on the wall, their own values, the family's values as lived, and the values the family ought to hold, so the gaps between the three were suddenly public and discussable. A running list of open questions stayed posted at the front of the room.
Expectation management is part of the method. Of the Rogers family's first two-day retreat, Jaffe reports plainly that it did not settle anything, though the family had hoped it would: "Rather it opened up a doorway," which led to deeper sharing, a monthly Family Council, and eventually the documents. The first retreat is a door, not a verdict. Families who expect a verdict declare the exercise a failure and never hold the second meeting, which is where the work actually happens.
The sequence ends at the Family Charter, which Jaffe calls the constitution of the family's relationship to its business: policies, expectations, rights, and responsibilities, made explicit so that "a family member can securely explore his or her future, knowing what he or she can expect, and ask, from the family and the business." His model text, the fictional Chase charter, organizes those agreements into five areas, and the choice of areas is itself the lesson.
How we do business: the family's ethics stated as policy, respect for employees, customers, and community, including a standing commitment of ten percent of profits to employees. Personal development: entrepreneurship named as a family tradition, with the family's wealth explicitly offered as "a resource pool for the development of good ideas," and support promised even for ventures outside the firm. Business participation: who may join, and the principle that those who run the businesses control them and those who participate earn the rewards. Stock ownership: shares offered to descendants according to contribution, a guaranteed way to cash out by selling back to the family, no sale of stock outside the family, and, remarkably, a right of return, the family committing to welcome back a member who left or never joined, "even if he or she left, or didn't enter, for a long period of time." And Family Council commitments: meetings twice a year, and a pledge that members will "respond directly to each other when we are feeling dissatisfied or upset," using mediators only as a bridge to direct speech, never as a substitute for it.
Notice what the five areas have in common: every one converts a question that ambushes families in crisis, who gets in, who gets shares, who can leave, how we fight, into an answer agreed in peacetime. That is the entire value of a charter. It is peacetime legislation for wartime questions.
Now our translation, stated as such: nothing in Jaffe's book addresses African families, so applying this sequence to a school-fees-and-land family in Nakuru or a diaspora family holding property across two continents is our extension, not his reporting. The translation is unusually natural here. The Family Council is a formalized version of a meeting many of our families already hold, the clan sitting, the family gathering after a funeral or before a wedding, and the four-document sequence answers a specifically African pain: our histories are overwhelmingly oral, held by elders whose memories will not wait, and our bitterest disputes, over land, over who educated whom, over which branch contributed what, are precisely disputes about undocumented agreements. A family that records its elders' story on video, writes down its values, and legislates its rules about property, participation, and return has converted its most fragile inheritance, memory, into its most durable one, paper. We would add one adaptation: where Jaffe's retreat assumes eleven people around one room, many of our families must design for forty people across three time zones, so the letters-in-advance mechanic and the recorded history matter even more for us than for his clients.
Documents this valuable need a home more durable than a drawer. This is exactly what the Document Vault module in LegacyPot is for: the recorded history, the credo, the mission, and the charter, stored with dates and versions, where every branch of the family can read them and no single relative's house fire, or memory, can erase them.
Do not attempt the charter this year. Attempt the first document. Within the next month, schedule the recording: two hours with your family's oldest living generation, an interviewer they trust, and a camera, walking through Jaffe's questions, the dreams, the start, the first money, the stages, told real rather than sanitized. Set the ground rules, keep a scribe, and let everyone reflect in silence before anyone speaks. When the recording exists, put it in the vault and put the next meeting on the calendar. The fictional Chase family had ninety-two years of agreements to write down. Your family has its own number, and the count only gets captured if this generation starts the paperwork.