A Family Meeting Is Not a Gathering — It Is Governance

Why do some families reach their sixth generation still holding tight together, while others scatter before the third? Most people will answer: closeness of blood, depth of feeling. The truth runs exactly the other way. Blood makes people kin. It does not keep them kin.

Early one morning in December 2011: Paris, a private club near the Arc de Triomphe with no sign at its door. The members of the Hermès family arrived in twos and threes, more than fifty of them. Some had come from Switzerland, some from the United States; most did not ordinarily work at the company, each with a livelihood of their own. A muster on this scale was something even the family’s elders had seen only a handful of times.

Presiding was the patriarch, Bertrand Puech. A little more than a year earlier, Bernard Arnault, the master of LVMH, had telephoned him to say that he already held seventeen percent of Hermès. In the year since that call the family had deliberated. This day, they had come to decide.

The lawyers read the plan out clause by clause: the family would put a majority of its shares into a holding company, locked for twenty years; no one would be allowed to sell. At market value, what went into the lock was eight billion euros.

When the reading ended, Puech spoke: those in favor, please stand.

Fifty-odd people rose almost in the same instant. From somewhere in the crowd, a Guerrand cousin called out: “Tonight I am prouder than ever to be a member of this family!”

By its sixth generation this family numbers more than two hundred people, and the blood between cousins thinned long ago. Most of them never touch the business; the company’s dividend is their only tie to it. By all ordinary logic, if even a few in such a crowd had wanted to cash out, Arnault would have won. But they stood up, and not one of them hesitated.

The Christmas lunch table

Begin with a meal that has been eaten for a hundred years.

The Rockefellers keep a rule: the whole family gathers twice a year. In June at the Pocantico estate in the Hudson Valley, the ancestral home handed down from the first Rockefeller; and at Christmastime in New York City, where a hundred or so of them sit down to a lunch. What gets said at that table changes every year and is every year much the same: how each branch’s investments have fared, how far the philanthropic projects have come, who has been added to the family, whose career has climbed a new rung.

Children earn a seat at this table only at twenty-one. A young person coming to it for the first time must stand and make a self-introduction before the whole family. Introduction made, they sit down — and from that day forward they are a grown member of the house of Rockefeller.

The rule was laid down in the third generation, and the meal has not lapsed once since. The seventh generation is eating at that table still.

Now look at another family of the same era, the railroad Vanderbilts. When old Cornelius drew his last breath he was the richest man in America, with a fortune that gave nothing away to the Rockefellers’. But the moment he was gone, the branches scattered. No one inherited the rule of the table, and no one felt any need to gather. In 1973, the Vanderbilt family held the first reunion in its history — and among the descendants who came, not one millionaire could be found.

Sixteen articles, reread every year

In Japan there is Kikkoman, where eight families have brewed soy sauce in partnership for more than three hundred years. Eight houses, several hundred people. How is it they never fell apart?

Their calendar, too, carries two gatherings a year, and each gathering has one fixed item of business: bring out the family constitution and read it through once more. Sixteen articles, finalized in 1926. Article one: never fight; always respect one another. Article four: judge people by character, not wealth. Article sixteen: never decide major matters alone. For a hundred years the text has come out annually and been held against the year’s events: which matters were handled by the rules, and which came close to crossing the line.

Article sixteen is not for show. In the late 1960s, Yuzaburo Mogi, a son of the Mogi family, proposed building a plant in America. The board voted the plan down. He revised it and brought it back; rejected again. Only on the third attempt did it pass. The plant eventually rose in Wisconsin and put Kikkoman’s soy sauce into American kitchens. A contribution of that size, and at the time it still had to go through the meeting three times, strictly by the book. With two rejections, the eight families told him: here, nothing is any one person’s call.

Further back, there is a case more grinding still. When the eight houses merged in 1917, each had its own label — whose would the new company carry? The question was on the table from the day of the merger and stayed there for twenty-three years, settled only in 1940: even the most powerful of the main branches gave up the name it had always used, and all accepted Kikkoman.

It was a decision made under the constitution, and not one person refused it. In all the years since, the eight houses have never once fallen out over the brand.

A dinner table

The Hermès family has a set of its own.

Twice a year, the current head, Axel Dumas, invites the twenty-odd cousins of the seventh generation to dinner. No business is discussed at this meal. He tells the family’s history; he tells them what the house believes and what it will not do; and when he warms to the theme, he reaches for the ruined families in Balzac’s novels to put this crowd of young people on their guard. He has a refrain: “Each of us is number two. Number one is always Hermès.”

On the third floor of headquarters, the office of the third-generation head, Émile-Maurice, is kept exactly as it was. Every so often, family members bring their children up to see the desk where their great-grandparents’ generation worked.

A dinner, an old office, one old saying told over and over. That morning in 2011, the instant when fifty-odd people rose almost as one — it was these small things, saved up.

The family with no meeting table

The counterexample we have already seen, in the house of Gucci.

In three generations of that family’s feuding, you cannot find a single table where matters could be talked through. While the grandfather lived, everything was his to decide. Once he was gone, the say went to whoever shouted loudest and hired the fiercest lawyers. Every dispute ran, in the end, to a grab for power or a day in court. The closest thing to a “family meeting” in the family’s surviving record is a board meeting in July 1982, at which Paolo came to blows with his father and his brothers on the spot — and in his pocket sat a tape recorder, switched on.

Four years later Aldo, eighty-one years old, went to prison because his own son had informed on him. And further on, the gunshots in a Milan street in 1995.

The Guccis lacked neither clever people nor money, and across three generations there was no shortage of chances to make peace. What they lacked was this: a table they sat down at regularly to talk, a place where a fight could stay inside the house. Without those, by the day when things finally have to be said, the only room left to sit down in is a courtroom.

How to run the meeting

The last time Samsung’s Lee family was all in one place was 2015, at a funeral. The eldest son, Lee Maeng-hee, had died, and siblings who had long since divided the estate were gathered together for the first time in decades. Many families are like this: everyone busy with their own affairs, and the occasions that truly bring them to one table are weddings and funerals — precisely the two occasions least suited to talking things over.

A family meeting should be held while nothing is the matter. As for how to hold one, the practice of long-lived families and the research on family governance have settled into a mature body of method. Distilled, it comes to six principles.

First, define the meeting’s mandate and separate the tiers of governance. A family meeting is not a shareholders’ meeting, and it is not a board meeting. The enterprise’s operating decisions belong to the board of directors; the family meeting handles the family’s own affairs: relationships among members, the rules governing the wealth, the raising of the next generation, the values held in common. The moment the two kinds of meeting blur into one, the roles interfere with each other — whoever is dominant in the business overrides the elders of the family, and family matters get adjudicated as if they were business. Scale calls for tiers as well. With fifteen adult members or fewer, the whole family can meet and deliberate directly. Above fifteen, there should be two layers: a family assembly and a family council. The assembly covers every member, meets once or twice a year, and exists to share information, educate members, and bind the family together. The council, of five to nine people, is the standing body: it sets family policy and links the enterprise’s board with the family office, meeting four to six times a year. The fifteen-person threshold comes from the research of John Davis at Harvard Business School. The “brothers’ meetings” of the Rockefeller third generation were in substance a family council: the five brothers met regularly to work through major matters, then reported to the gatherings of the whole family.

Second, fix the meeting cycle. The family assembly should meet at least once a year — twice is better — on dates that are fixed. The Rockefellers set theirs at June and Christmas, and in a hundred years have not moved them. A fixed calendar does three things: it spares the family the cost of negotiating a date each time; it turns absence into a decision that has to be weighed seriously; and it gives every member a stable expectation that the family will assemble. Alongside it, establish one companion principle: attendance is voluntary, and the meeting is never called off because particular members cannot come. A meeting’s authority comes from its continuity, not from any one year’s turnout.

Third, define who takes part. Who is entitled to attend should be set down in writing beforehand, not weighed afresh each time. Spouses, as a rule, should be included: shutting the in-laws out is where suspicion tends to begin — and they are, after all, the parents of the family’s next generation. The common arrangement is to divide the meeting into two parts. The parts that concern family history, education, and shared public matters are open to spouses and children alike; the parts that concern equity and finances are limited to direct blood descendants or shareholders. For children, set a clear age threshold: from twelve or thirteen they may sit in and listen, and at an agreed age they formally receive a seat. The Rockefellers set that age at twenty-one, and a new member’s first act at the table is a self-introduction before everyone. The point of the threshold is not restriction. It is to make entry into the family’s deliberations a formal credential of adulthood.

Fourth, design a balanced agenda. The agenda cannot be all finance. The family-business researchers Aronoff and Ward proposed a “four quarters” agenda structure: one quarter for reporting, covering the business’s operations and the family’s finances; one quarter for learning, including wealth education and the workings of trusts and tax; one quarter for the family itself, the telling and discussion of its history and values; and one quarter for fellowship and leisure. The Rockefeller Christmas lunch is exactly this structure: the reports on investments and philanthropy are the business, the elders’ telling of the founding story is the inheritance, the new members’ introductions and each branch’s news are the bond, and the lunch itself is the reunion. The consequences of imbalance are plain. An agenda that is all finance degrades the family meeting into a shareholders’ meeting; all reminiscence, and it degrades into an ordinary dinner party. Neither can carry the work of governance.

Fifth, establish rules of procedure. The rules should be few, but they must be written down and kept by everyone. The core of them: a speaker is not interrupted; discussion addresses the matter, not the person; company titles stop at the meeting-room door — inside, everyone is a family member, and no one is anyone’s boss; and the chair rotates, with the younger generation taking turns to run the meeting, so that it never hardens into one patriarch’s monologue. Every meeting should produce minutes recording three things: what was decided, who will execute it, and by when. The first item of the next meeting is to check how the last meeting’s resolutions were carried out. With follow-up, a resolution is a resolution; without it, the meeting was only conversation. The Rockefellers keep one unwritten supplementary rule besides: members may not solicit one another for their respective philanthropic projects. Anything that could load the table with personal obligation is excluded from it in advance.

Sixth, start with low-sensitivity topics. A family that has never held a family meeting should deliberately lower the difficulty of the first one. Keep money and equity off the agenda, and enter through three kinds of content that are low in sensitivity and high in consensus: family history, family values, the children’s education. Choose neutral ground — not anyone’s home, and not the company. If no one is confident about steering the room, engage an outside facilitator for the first few sessions, a neutral third party who guarantees every member the chance to speak. The first meeting needs to reach only one minimum goal: fix the date of the next one. Once the calendar is set, the institution stands; as it runs on year after year, its authority accumulates with every meeting held.

A closing thought

Back to that club in Paris.

The meeting over, the fifty-odd members of the Hermès family went their separate ways — back to their own countries, back to their own livelihoods. Many of them will never work a day at the company in their lives. But they know they will meet again, as their fathers and grandfathers did: twice a year, on and on.

To judge whether a family can pass itself on, do not ask how close the blood runs. Ask one thing: whether they have a table they sit down at, on schedule.

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Case sources: The Saddle Stitch: Six Generations of Hermès and the War for Its Soul; The Rockefeller Century: From Oil Monopoly to the Invention of Modern Philanthropy; Eight Families, One Brew: Kikkoman’s 360-Year Experiment in Restraint; The Shadow of the Double G: The Rise and Ruin of the House of Gucci; The Samsung Family Story: When a Dynasty Decides to End Hereditary Succession

Academic references

• Craig E. Aronoff & John L. Ward (2011) Family Meetings: How to Build a Stronger Family and a Stronger Business, Palgrave Macmillan
• Ivan Lansberg (1999) Succeeding Generations: Realizing the Dream of Families in Business
• Dennis T. Jaffe (2020) Borrowed from Your Grandchildren: The Evolution of 100-Year Family Enterprises
• James E. Hughes Jr., Susan E. Massenzio & Keith Whitaker (2022) Complete Family Wealth: Wealth as Well-Being