Somewhere in the middle of The Stewardship of Wealth, his 2012 book on how families keep money across generations, Gregory Curtis draws a caricature so precise it stings. He is describing how a...
Somewhere in the middle of The Stewardship of Wealth, his 2012 book on how families keep money across generations, Gregory Curtis draws a caricature so precise it stings. He is describing how a certain kind of family makes investment decisions, and he asks the reader to check themselves against it: "Investment ideas are communicated to your family by your advisor; your family takes these ideas under advisement; the ideas are forwarded to the family's investment committee; Uncle Ralph, who hates hedge funds, weighs in from his safari in Africa; somebody checks the policy statement and notices that not enough notice has been given to younger generations to review the recommendations; Uncle Ralph will return from safari next month, so why rush into a decision he's likely to oppose? And so on."
For Curtis's American readers, the safari is a punchline: the unreachable rich relative, off photographing lions while the family's money waits on his opinion. Reading it from the other side of that joke, the picture inverts, and it gets more useful, not less. In the families we write for, African families at home and scattered across the diaspora, nobody has to imagine an Uncle Ralph. We have him. Except he is not on safari in Africa. He is on a night shift in Minneapolis, or between jobs in London, or driving for a rideshare in Toronto, eight time zones from the farm, and the maize is sitting in the store while the family waits for him to answer the WhatsApp group.
Curtis founded the advisory firm Greycourt & Co. after decades inside a Pittsburgh family office, and Chapter 7 of his book, where Uncle Ralph lives, is his account of why family money committees fail. His subjects are wealthy Americans with advisors, hedge funds, and formal investment committees, machinery most of our readers will never touch, and we will be honest throughout about which parts of his world do not transfer. But the disease he diagnoses is not American. It is structural, and any family that has ever watched a good opportunity die in a group chat already has it.
Curtis's first move is generous, and it matters: he does not blame the family members. The family investment committee, he argues, was borrowed from the world of charity and school boards, where any competent, public-spirited generalist can serve. Managing money is not like that. It requires knowledge so specialized that most families cannot field even one or two genuinely qualified members. So the committee does what committees of well-meaning generalists always do. It operates by consensus, because nobody wants to offend anybody: "Decisions almost always reflect the lowest common denominator," Curtis writes, "because to do otherwise would necessarily offend some committee member." The results are what he calls "woolly thinking," conventional wisdom adopted at exactly the wrong moment, and panicked reactions to short-term events that soon reverse.
Then he names the subtlest failure, the one that comes from virtue rather than vice. Every member of a committee wants to contribute. Nobody wants to be the one with no ideas. So even when the family's money is well arranged and the best possible action is to leave it alone, each member tosses in an idea once a year, and "the aggregate effect is that the portfolio will find itself constantly being rejiggered." The committee's need to feel useful becomes a tax on the thing it exists to protect.
Strip away the American furniture and look at what remains, because it describes the family WhatsApp group perfectly. A dozen relatives, all loving, none expert, each needing to be heard, deciding by exhaustion rather than by judgment. The plot purchase debated for eleven months. The shop restock argued to a standstill. The decision that finally goes to whoever was loudest, or whoever sulked longest, which is consensus by another name. The people are good. The shape is broken.
Curtis's second insight is the one families resist hardest, because it attacks something that feels like a virtue: thoroughness. Families believe, he writes, that careful, inclusive process leads to good outcomes. His reply is blunt: "Like it or not, every day we spend being prudent is a day that our returns go down, because our investment ideas are going stale while we are waiting to implement them. Add these opportunity costs up over the days and months and years and we have a seriously underperforming portfolio."
His evidence from thirty years of watching families is uncomfortable. First, "families almost never disagree with a good advisor's recommendations; they just implement them too slowly." All that deliberation, all those meetings, and the family ends up doing what was proposed anyway, minus the weeks in which the idea was worth the most. Second, on the rare occasions a family does overrule sound advice, it is usually wrong, so the delay and the veto compound each other.
You do not need a portfolio for this arithmetic to find you. A trader offers a fair price for the harvest, and the offer expires while the group chat deliberates; the family eventually sells at the low season price everyone was trying to avoid. A neighboring plot comes up for sale at a good number, and by the time the abroad brother has been consulted, the plot is gone to a family that answered in two days. A tenant is ready to sign, and the sign-off dies between three aunties' schedules. In every case the family will say, truthfully, that nobody did anything wrong. That is precisely Curtis's point. Prudence has a price, and families never put it on the receipt. What he calls opportunity cost, our families experience as the sale that went to someone faster, and the cruelest part is that it never appears in any ledger. You cannot see the money you were too slow to make.
Curtis does not conclude that families should get out of the way of their money. He concludes that they are doing the wrong job. His fix is a division of labor, and it is the most transferable idea in the chapter: identify what families do best and what executors do best, and assign the tasks accordingly.
The questions that matter most, he observes, have no deadline attached. How much risk should the family take? What does the family actually value? What must never be sold, and what is the money ultimately for? These questions deserve every voice, every elder, every branch, all the soul-searching a family can bring, precisely because they are slow questions. The work ends in a written policy: the walls of the field. And once the walls are built, the fast questions, which specific action, this week, at this price, belong to one named, accountable person operating inside those walls, without needing a quorum for every move.
Translate that into the shape of our families and it becomes a rule you can adopt this month. The whole family, both at home and abroad, decides the standing policy: we keep six months of school fees liquid before any new venture; we take on no debt against the land, ever; we sell produce whenever the price clears an agreed floor, without a meeting; repairs under an agreed amount need no approval. Then one steward, a brother, a daughter, a trusted cousin, executes inside that policy and reports monthly. Nobody waits on Uncle Ralph, because Uncle Ralph already voted, months ago, when the walls were set. The policy is his voice, present even when he is unreachable. And note what this structure quietly fixes from Curtis's committee pathology: the relatives' need to contribute now has a proper outlet. They contribute where contribution helps, at the level of policy, instead of where it harms, at the level of every transaction.
Curtis's book assumes a family gathered in one country, one legal system, one time zone, served by an advisory industry with a phone number. It has nothing to say about the structure many of our readers actually live in: the diaspora member who funds the most and is present the least. So this section is our extension, not his.
The diaspora relative occupies an impossible position in family money. Because their remittances built the shop or bought the plot, the family feels it cannot move without them; because they are eight time zones away and working, they cannot respond at the speed decisions need. So they become Uncle Ralph against their will: the absent voice everything waits on. And the waiting breeds a second poison. When the family does act without them, they learn about it after the fact and feel used: good enough to fund the decision, not good enough to be asked. When the family does wait for them, opportunities die, and they get blamed for a delay they never chose. Silence gets read as disagreement, or as consent, depending on what the people at home already wanted. Everyone is behaving reasonably, and everyone ends up resentful.
The division-of-labor rule dissolves this trap, because it changes what the diaspora member is asked for. Their seat belongs at the policy table: the scheduled call, twice a year, where risk, values, floors, and ceilings are argued and set, at a slow speed that survives time zones. What they give up is the transaction veto, the expectation that the family will hold every sale and every repair until they have weighed in. What they gain is better than a veto: a policy that carries their voice into every decision made while they sleep, a named steward accountable to standards they helped write, and a monthly report instead of a nightly argument. The remitter stops being a bottleneck and becomes what they always actually were: a founder of the family's policy.
One caution as you build this, and it is ours, not the book's. The steward role only works when the reporting is real. A steward who executes without reporting is not a steward; over time he becomes an owner, whatever the documents say, because information is possession in a family. The monthly report, short, written, and sent whether the month was good or bad, is not bureaucracy. It is the price of the mandate.
This, finally, is what the Family Council module in LegacyPot is shaped for: a place where the family's standing policy is written where every branch can read it, where the steward's mandate and its limits are recorded rather than remembered, and where the monthly report lands as a note every member sees, in Minneapolis as easily as in Mbale. The walls of the field, kept where nobody can quietly move them.
Here is the work for this month, and it takes one family call and one page.
Call the meeting, with the diaspora members present, and separate your family's money questions into the two piles Curtis describes. Slow questions: what we never sell, how much we keep liquid, what price floors and spending ceilings we agree on, what the money is for. Decide those together, every voice included, and write them down as the family's standing policy. Fast questions: everything else. Name one steward to decide them inside the policy, alone, at the speed opportunities actually move. Agree on the monthly report. Then, and this is the part that makes it real, pick the most recent decision that stalled in your family's group chat and run it through the new structure out loud, so everyone can see where it would have gone and how fast.
Uncle Ralph comes home from safari eventually. The month the family spent waiting for him never does. Build the field so that nobody has to wait again, and so that every voice, including the one furthest away, is permanently inside the walls.