Is the family office managing assets, or quietly becoming the organization that shapes the family's future?
That shift matters for practitioners because it changes the question. If a family office is treated only as an administrative or investment vehicle, the conversation quickly turns to services, staffing models, and benchmarking. But if it is also a governance structure, then choices that look technical begin to look strategic: who decides, how control is shared, what kinds of behavior are reinforced, and how a family's values and long-term aims are carried forward.
This is one practical reason the review's conceptual approach is worth mentioning. The authors draw on agency theory, stewardship, and socio-emotional wealth to show that family offices must be understood not only in terms of efficiency and returns, but also in terms of trust, responsibility, family cohesion, and the protection of legacy. Understood this way, governance is more than a set of committees than a family's capacity to decide together, to hold its differences, and to renew itself over time. For families, that is useful not as theory for its own sake, but as a reminder that the hardest family office decisions are rarely only financial.
The review also challenges the language of universal best practices. One of its clearest messages is that the structure and behavior of a family office depend heavily on family priorities. The choice among a single family office, multi-family office, virtual office, embedded model, or in-house structure is not simply operational. It has consequences for control, privacy, professionalization, transparency, and the transmission of family legacy.
Read that way, the family office behaves less according to any borrowed template than according to where the family sits in its own story. The review finds that later-generation single family offices place greater emphasis on family-related goals and governance mechanisms, while first-generation offices tend to invest more in entrepreneurial activity, especially direct entrepreneurial investments. It also shows that offices connected to families who still own the original business tend to emphasize asset preservation, non-financial goals, and transgenerational control more strongly than offices created after the business has been sold.
That is why the article is a useful bridge to what might be called best thinking rather than best practice. If office design reflects family purpose, willingness to share assets, ownership complexity, generational stage, and the continuing role of the operating business, then replicating what another office does may matter less than thinking carefully about what this family is trying to preserve, build, and become. The review supports exactly that move away from imitation and toward more grounded judgment.
It also gives reason for humility. Of the 60 studies in the review, only 16 are empirical. The field sees large, visible multi-family offices more clearly than the private single family offices that are often hardest to access and least represented in the evidence. The review therefore suggests that much of the confident guidance in circulation still rests on a limited empirical base.
That limitation is not a weakness in the article. It is one of its most important contributions. The authors explicitly call for deeper qualitative and empirical work, including confidential access, case-based inquiry, and closer attention to how family offices are actually organized and governed from the inside, especially in single family offices.
This is where the black box opens. Much of the field still describes the family office from the outside: what services it offers, what asset classes it holds, or which model it resembles. Far less is known about how decisions are truly made, how roles are coordinated, how different functions interact, how the office engages the family, and how it balances financial, relational, and legacy goals in practice.
That gap is the steppingstone to a new research initiative at the Global Family Enterprise Program. It is also where we would add a family enterprise lens, consistent with how we have long approached the family office at Columbia Business School: not as a firm, a fund, or a foundation, but as an organization in its own right. Rather than assembling another set of borrowed templates, the project studies the family office as an organization: its governance, its people, its decisions, and its relationships with advisors, partners, and markets. It does so through confidential interviews with principals, chief investment officers, and leaders across functions, alongside a complementary survey on investment strategy and structure.
The question is not only how to manage the wealth, but who the family needs to become in order to steward it well.
For practitioners, the point is not to reject experience or ignore what others do. It is to resist mistaking patterns for answers. The more useful question may not be, "What is the best practice family office model?" but rather, "What kind of organization does this family need if it wants to steward not just financial capital, but also judgment, relationships, responsibility, and continuity over time?"
THE RESEARCH ANCHOR
Siaba, Rivera, and Currais (2026). "The contribution of family offices to family businesses." European Research on Management and Business Economics, vol. 32. Open access. A PRISMA systematic review of 60 peer-reviewed studies published between 1980 and 2024, of which 16 are empirical.
Reflection Questions
- What forms of wealth does the family office currently organize, and which forms receive too little attention?
- When discussing structure, is the family choosing a model for efficiency alone, or also for the kind of governance, control, and continuity it wants to create?
- Is the office helping family members become more capable owners, or unintentionally making them more passive beneficiaries?
- As the family and its wealth evolve, what must the office learn from the inside rather than borrow from the outside?
There may not be a Family Office Day, but National Family Owned and Operated Businesses Day gives us a useful opening. It invites us to celebrate not only the businesses families build, but also the ownership responsibilities that continue as wealth grows beyond the operating company.
A practical call to action, then, is twofold. First, for families and advisors: use this moment to revisit what your family office is really doing for you. What forms of wealth is it stewarding? What kind of owners is it helping you become? Does its current design reflect your best thinking, or inherited templates?
Second, for those who work in or with family offices: consider lending your experience to this research effort. By opening doors for confidential conversations and sharing how your office actually operates, you can help the field move beyond slogans and offer families guidance worthy of the responsibilities they carry.