This article, “Flourishing Performance Indicators,” written by Cale Dowell, Beniamin Pascut, and Matthew T. Lee, is shared here with their permission. The original article was first published here.
We are living through the greatest wealth transfer in human history. Trillions of dollars are moving from one generation to the next — quietly, inevitably, and often without a map. By some estimates, more than $84 trillion will pass from Baby Boomers to their heirs and philanthropic causes by 2045 (Cerulli Associates 2022). For advisors, families, and institutions alike, this moment represents both tremendous opportunity and hidden risk.
Much of this wealth is concentrated in the hands of business owners — family firms contribute 87% of business tax returns and 54% of private sector GDP — and studies suggest that up to 90% of the wealth these families steward will be lost by the third generation (Williams and Preisser 2003).
We argue that the critical reason for this preventable loss is that families have rarely considered the importance of flourishing for good stewardship of inter-generational wealth and legacy. It is worth noting that an inordinate share of this wealth (perhaps more than 70%) in the next 10 to 15 years will be controlled by widows (Garmhausen 2025) who tend to outlive the founders/leaders of family business and who will likely be more interested in FPIs (Flourishing Performance Indicators) than these founders/leaders. We offer a new framework and practical set of indicators that can expand the scope of business and family conversations immediately.
Our framework and metrics can be easily adapted for use in publicly traded companies as well (VanderWeele and Johnson 2025).
Traditionally, success is measured by one dominant metric: growth and preservation of financial capital. Did the assets grow? Were taxes minimized? Were trusts executed properly? While these are all important questions, they are also incomplete. We’ve grown used to tracking what is measurable, but not necessarily what matters most. In our chase for performance metrics — Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) — we’ve elevated financial dashboards above relational, emotional, and even spiritual health. And it’s not working.
Read the rest of the article here.
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