Insights

I know someone who has fundamentally changed the way I think about what it means to show up for people. Her name is Joelle Paul-Cook. And she doesn't talk about generosity as a value. She practices it in ways most people wouldn't think to — and at hours most people wouldn't answer. She sponsors people she believes in. She takes over running companies when she sees something worth saving. She builds brands from the inside out — including Bad Mermaid, a mission-driven energy dr

The most valuable thing in the room is rarely the most expensive one. Every room I have ever been in has taught me that. But the first place to teach me was a barn — and watching the evolution of the horse show management company my mentor grew from a local barn in New York to what was considered, at its peak, the largest horse show management company in the world. After my first couple of years of horseback riding lessons, my birthday and Christmas lists simply repeated "a h

My parents made a mistake when I was 4 years old. They moved us to a house behind a horse barn. They didn't think it through. Because from the kitchen window you could see the field. The horses. The riders. The whole world I didn't belong to yet but couldn't stop watching. Every birthday. Every Christmas. One wish. Always the same. Years later they started us with lessons. My sister was 8. I was 10. School horses. Borrowed time on animals that belonged to everyone and no one.

The numbers are striking. Women are set to control a significant and growing share of the generational wealth transfer currently underway. They are building companies, inheriting family enterprises, and stepping into family office leadership roles at a pace that would have been unrecognizable a generation ago. And yet the family office world — its events, its networks, its advisory structures, its language — has been remarkably slow to reflect that reality. That is what this