About Us
Mission Statement
Building Family “Values-Based Cultures” for an “Outcome of Abundance”,
noted for their “Leadership and Accountability”.
Our goal at Prestige Strategies LLC is to help families build their cultures based upon solid values that generate abundance for all concerned. It is a simple Mission.
A Prestige Strategies Family Office is a unique manifestation of the Free Enterprise System. The ultimate outcome of Free Enterprise is abundance. That means, among other things, it generates an abundance of time and money. The effect is not just for a single class of people. In its truest sense, abundance is spread throughout the population: the lower class, the middle class and the upper class.
The Family, governed by principles, laws and rules provided to us by God, the highest authority in the Universe, is the core unit of successful nations, exemplified by the Roman Empire and the United States of America. Rome fell, and the United States is falling, as a result of the disintegration of the American Family.
Free enterprise dominates the Western Cultures of our world. The values of the Western World are significantly different than most Asian Cultures. That is not to say that they are better. They are simply different, and that difference allows for abundance.
Having an abundance of time allows for more activities than just production of goods and service. An abundance of money allows for excess capital to be allocated to broader applications than simply sustaining the production of goods and services.
In Western Culture, there are 125 “values”, sometimes referred to as “priorities”, that exist in our vernacular, according to Brian Hall’s “Values Shift”. There are “goals” values and there are “means” values. This is in accordance with studies done by Brian Hall, where he reveals in his book: “Values Shift”. This book has been translated into 22 languages.
Of these 125 “values”, only about 65 of them exist in some Asian countries; China, for example. Many of those that are lacking have to do with family, philanthropy, education, personal achievement, and spirituality. There is a hierarchy of values, similar to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Brian Hall does not use a Pyramid to display values, rather like a Gannt Chart, progressing from left to right.
The first stage in the chart is “Survival”. The next is “Family”. Hall begins with values that are important to survival, and progresses over four main “frames”. The last two stages are “Self-Initiating” and “Interdependent Global Ethics & Morality”. The values in the third and fourth frames do not even exist in some other cultures. That is one of the reasons why we have trouble understanding how other cultures operate.
In communistic regimes the rulers do everything to keep the population in “survival“ mode. They diminish respect for the family as an institution, because if the population is to be kept from breaking through to greater heights, they must not let “family” be institutionalized and respected.
A personal example comes to mind. When I was in banking, I was appointed to “train” the personnel of a bank that the FDIC “encouraged” my bank to take over. I had 67 branches at the time, and the other bank had 37. We were four times the size of that bank. My bank was the oldest and largest bank of its kind. Our executive officers were prominent, main line types, and were the epitome of Philadelphia’s cultural elite. The other bank did not have the same provenance.
In addition to the trauma of having to close some of their branches because they were adjacent to some of ours, and unnecessary, I discovered that there was an entirely different culture at the other bank. Not better nor worse, just different. Some things (“values”) were missing that made communicating our values a chore. We lost some people because of that.
That is how I learned that people holding a certain set of values have difficulty in dealing with people who have different values, perhaps an advanced stage of values. Even worse is when the other party has none of those certain values that are peculiarly “Western”, which is the case between Wester Cultures and some Eastern Cultures.
Leadership and Accountability are core factors in our perception of a successful Family Office.
Understanding one’s own leadership style is fundamental to leading others. Our Leadership Research Analysis goes a long way to helping you know yourself and how to most effectively lead others.
Accountability to others is the premise upon which we establish all recordkeeping, reporting and decision-making. If we are accountable only to ourselves, as the saying goes, you may have a fool for a leader. There is one book that has more knowledge about accountability than any other book. The book was used by our Founding Fathers to establish the greatest free nation on the earth. From this book, the founders knew the frailties of man, and accounted for them in the formulation of our Constitution. The book, of course, is the Holy Bible.
Let’s get back to the Prestige Family Office as a model of the Free Enterprise System. The foundation of our model is based upon those values that generate abundance for all the stakeholders in the family enterprise. The values are also a set of guidelines for all the family members and for those who are employed by the family office.
The abundance of the family office manifests itself in the abundance of the community that the family office serves, including other businesses, charities, schools, churches, families, and individuals. Sharing their abundance includes sharing their values, which, indeed, defines the culture of the community.
Our goal at Prestige Strategies LLC is to help families build their cultures based upon solid values that generate abundance for all concerned. It is a simple Mission.
Our Reason for Being
Our reason for being (raison d’etre) is to foster values upon which our country was founded. These values include our freedom to speak, freedom to create enterprises, freedom to protect ourselves against oppressors and freedom to worship our God. We believe that everyone living in our country is entitled to hold these values, and everyone in God’s creation is likewise entitled.
We believe that the ”family” is at the center of our effort, and that successful families founded on these values are the core of our culture. The more we can help families to be successful based on values, the greater will be the achievements of our society.
There are people who don’t believe in freedom, who will oppress the population and deprive them of the benefits of freedom. Paulo Freire (1978) said it this way, referring particularly to the economically oppressed:
“The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom. Freedom would require them to reject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility. Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man, nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion.”(1)
Successful families, based upon “values”, serve as the best model and image of freedom – taking full responsibility for the outcomes of their family dream. Some can spend time serving and educating by example those who might be among the oppressed. Economically successful families can dedicate both time - and money - to this effort.
Freire discovered that language, particularly when it included literacy in the form of reading and writing, enabled people to image the world differently. The first obligation we all have is for the children and grandchildren are able to put their thoughts and ideas onto paper, so they can see their reality differently. The next obligation is to our community, so they are literate sufficiently to do the same.
Freire implied that there is something inherent within written and spoken languages that can alter a person’s consciousness. This something is values. We encourage all the families who join with us in the formation of a “family office” that they commit to their self-identified values in the further development of their family, and their contribution to the development of their community. Each family joins in the struggle against the oppressors who are attempting to lead our country astray, by setting the example of how freedom works.