Beyond the Preserve and Grow Paradigm: Developing a Theory of Wealth

Ownership Project Insights, No. 3. Saïd Business School, University of Oxford.

Diverse voices increasingly highlight the potential for private wealth to play a critical role in addressing urgent global challenges. As a demographic, UHNWIs can be uniquely agile and relatively free from the short-term performance pressures which other capital providers face. But this potential cannot be achieved without reckoning with the social norm that the purpose of wealth is primarily to be preserved and grown.

We offer a holistic approach to asset owners’ wealth in its entirety, across their foundations, businesses, and investment portfolios. Some UHNWIs and investment advisors have been working to set impact investing objectives or to undertake family-wide exercises to identify a family mission or purpose. Frameworks and sets of questions to guide these activities exist. We know from our research and advisory work that these can be powerful actions for families and their investment portfolios or foundations, but they are typically calibrated to either investing or philanthropy – not both.