Governance Lives in Behavior, Not Binders: Nicholas Mukhtar on Family Offices
A family charter drafted by lawyers and filed away does almost nothing. Nicholas Mukhtar has seen enough family offices to know that governance only works when it shows up in daily behavior.
He is careful not to reduce governance to legal documents and org charts. What holds it together, he argues, is communication, and he treats that as a functional mechanism rather than a soft skill. When he works with a family office where tension has surfaced, his first diagnostic question is almost always the same: did anyone actually sit down and say what was bothering them? “Communication is key on any team,” he said. “I played sports growing up. My dad’s a legendary high school soccer coach in Michigan. That’s the theme in sports, in business, in life, in partnerships, in marriages and families.”
The highest-leverage place to start, in his view, is also the most practical. Clarify who has authority over what. When approval for every decision flows through a single person, operations stall and frustration accumulates quietly. A written framework that defines decision scope at different levels, and gets reviewed when the family changes, removes the bottleneck without requiring a wholesale overhaul.
Mukhtar is not prescriptive about which formal structures a family should adopt. Governance needs to fit the size and culture of the family, and adding layers of complexity for its own sake usually makes things worse. What he insists on is that the structures, whatever form they take, get actively used and revisited when circumstances change. A charter delivers value only when it is woven into how decisions actually get made, not drafted once and left in a drawer.
His view of large family offices draws on years working at the intersection of public institutions and private enterprise. Big offices can calcify the same way big-city government does, slow to adapt and resistant to outside perspective. The antidote is the one he has used before: bring in an outside voice not embedded in the day-to-day. “There’s a lot of cynicism about companies using McKinsey and outside consultants,” he said, “but the rationale is sound: you bring in an outside voice that isn’t ingrained in the day-to-day, and can actually think creatively.”
He points to the same approach behind New York City’s parks revival and Detroit’s public health work, where outside thinking unlocked progress that entrenched institutions could not manage alone.
Governance, in this telling, is a living practice. It lives in the conversations a family is willing to have and the decisions it makes out in the open, not in the binder on the shelf.
