Understanding the Family Office
What is essential is often invisible.
While reading my daughter her nightly bedtime story, I recently reacquainted myself with The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. The story opens on a tiny asteroid, where the Little Prince carefully tends to a vain and demanding rose who insists she is unique in all the universe. Confused by her pride and contradictions, the Little Prince leaves his planet in search of understanding.
On each planet he meets an adult who is busy guarding something that does not really matter: a king with no subjects who insists on his title, a businessman who spends his life counting stars he claims to “own,” a lamplighter who keeps lighting and extinguishing a lamp because those are the “rules.”
Eventually, the boy comes to Earth and meets a fox. Unlike the others, the fox teaches the boy that when you form a real relationship with something — when you tend to it, care for it, shape it — you don’t just have it; you take on responsibility. That is when the fox tells the Little Prince:
You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, 1943.
The Little Prince suddenly understands his rose. She is not a collectible to be kept under glass. Her true value lies in the cumulative energy he invested in caring for her over time.
Sophisticated families come to the same realization about the capital they build or inherit. Corporations are corpus—a single body formed by relationships aligned toward a shared economic purpose. The productive energy of those relationships becomes capital. Unironically, accumulated family wealth held in trust is also referred to in the law as the corpus. Like the Little Prince’s rose, capital cannot be left beneath a cloche to stagnate. It requires attention, judgment, and action to remain alive.
