26 November 2020
Dear Richard and Montserrat,
On an unfamiliar road, the driver stopped to ask for directions. A stranger approached the side of the car scratching their head in deep thought. After a long pause, they looked off into the distance first one way and then the other. After a thoughtful sigh, the reply came,’ Well, now I wouldn’t be starting from here!’
It is our concern that we are entering the unfamiliar in ways that could well overwhelm our collective sense of direction with change no longer a generation to generation matter. Rather we see changes being forced on us by an intensity of events that will be marked in five rather than twenty-year periods! To record our sense of these times 50 will send our postcards as ‘Signs and Portents’ from what we see and observe from our travels here and there, the journeys of our minds, and our findings from client conversations, research and readings.
These will be gleanings across a broad range of issues including demographics, geopolitics, climate change, technology, economics, taxation, and the like. We hope to share with our readers the counter-intuitive, and the thought-provoking. Invariably, as with any such scribblings, we will miss much and be, at times, not able to fully remove our blinkers but we hope that our correspondents will share their insights and thoughts.
Our postcards are to encourage thinking outside of the box, to consider the possibility of what may appear to be the impossible and to review and challenge comfortable assumptions.
Now, as perhaps never before, families with business and complex interests need to engage with and anticipate change. These are times, we believe, that people need to see how the hard as much as the soft skills of the family and their advisors should take careful stock of what is happening. In this, it would be well not to assume that our current stated destinations are still the road we should be on. The daily deluge of news shows that so much is changing and changing in non-lineal directions with a speed that can be difficult to comprehend.
So let us see if we can find the better of the roads before us.
Best Wishes,
Alistdair
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