THE FAMILY STRATEGY TOOLKIT
The Family Strategy Toolkit is a template
families use to develop and determine the medium and long-term development goals
they would like to achieve. The full toolkit empowers families to exploit their
family gifting, create wealth, positively influence society, transform their environments
and leave a legacy. The toolkit is especially useful for both young and mature families
seeking a roadmap through the challenging (and sometimes chaotic) seasons of life
and working hard to achieve an elusive “work-life balance” formula. Send for a
free toolkit from mdi@mdi.co.ke
and read the rest of this document to find out how to make it work for you.
BACKGROUND.
The Family Strategy Toolkit is
based on the principles put forward in the book Family
Strategy by Allan & Violet Bukusi.
The authors draw on Biblical wisdom, the dynamic realities of family life and the
concepts of successfully business strategy to create eight principles that help
married couples efficiently run the business of family. While other writers
focus on the importance of the relational aspects of love, marriage and family,
the authors suggest that a sound understanding of the purpose and business of
family is critical to sustaining caring marriages and maintaining love in family
relations by acknowledging and providing for the fulfillment of all family members
life goals, dreams, personal aspirations and destiny.
THE FULL VALUE OF FAMILY STRATEGY
You get the full value of the Family Strategy by, 1) reading the book
to obtain a critical and core appreciation of the subject, 2) attending the
training workshop to understand how best to apply the success principles in
your situation and make them work for you. And, 3) appropriately filling
in each section of the Family Strategy Toolkit to enable you to create and
commit to realizing practical yet inspiring personalized strategic goals.
However, by thoughtfully completing
each section of the Family Strategy Toolkit can give you a quick start to
transforming your family in the hope that you will in time obtain a copy of the
book and attend the workshop to complete your understanding of family strategy and
realize its lifetime benefits. The short section completion notes that follow
below will help set you off on the path to successful family strategy.
THE PURPOSE OF THE TOOLKIT
The Toolkit enables married couples
to create a personalized strategy to inspire them to realize their dreams, guide
the family through life’s predictable crisis, encourage the couple to meet
discuss and prepare for future (financial) needs and motivate them to seek out Gods
purposes for the family’s unique gifting.
NOTICE
Family strategy is not a
prenuptial agreement, but will find application among married couples committed
to working together to making a success of their marriage and family life.
Family strategy is not a magic wand, panacea or “counseling session”,. Neither
does using the tool guarantee users desired success. family strategy is merely a tool in the hands
of committed a couples willing to use all the resources God has placed in their
hands and work hard to achieve good success in life.
USERS
Though all family members will benefit
from the practice of Family strategy principles at every stage in life, couples
between the ages of 30-45 years will quickly grasp its power and importance as a
practical tool to successfully navigate, resolve and overcome the predictable crisis
and challenges of family life.
FAMILY STRATEGY TOOLKIT SECTION BY SECTION COMPLETION NOTES
OUR FAMILY PHILOSOPHY
In this section, couples are
encouraged to define a common understanding of family, marriage and parenting. Some
of the major difficulties couples experience in moving the family agenda
forward stem from undiscussed understanding and commitment to divergent family
values. By agreeing on a primary approach to the core issues of family life, a
married couple lays a foundation that prepares the family to reach accelerated
agreement and action on secondary matters such as wealth, careers and family roles. We suggest that the family
philosophy be based on godly principles and not just personal opinion.
VISION MISSION & VALUES
You do not have to be in business
to have a vision. Having a corporate vision as family is immensely liberating,
as partners will benefit from the support of the other in pursuit of the common
(combined vision). Individual dreams do NOT have to die for a united vision to
be achieved. Indeed the corporate vision benefits from the strength of
submitting (combining) the two visions to define the new. Partners will find
themselves appropriately stretched by the commitment to the new vision.
GAIT
The family gifting requires a
couple to investigate and invest in the gifting of every family member to
realize the family’s full potential. Every family has a unique gifting, experience
and education that can be harnessed to achieve its most competitive advantage. The
exercise to find out the family gifting should not be a “one off” exercise rather
it should be continuous process of investigation, exploration and exploitation.
STRATEGIC GOALS
The strategic goals you set for
your family should not be simple improvement goals rather they should be goals
that will transform your family life for good. If you don’t own a home, set a
goal to own one. Such a goal will stretch, challenge and inspire you to commit and
engage all your (physical, mental and material) resources to bring it to being.
Such goals will mean you will have to make sacrifices, savings and design
schemes to help you realize your goals. Good strategic goals will grow you as a
person and strengthen your marriage as you commit to work together to achieve a
previously impossible goal.
WEALTH CREATION
Every family is a steward to some
amount of wealth. The more competent you become at handling the (modest) wealth
you have, the more wealth you can handle. The ability to create wealth is a
mark of growth and a great blessing. Interestingly, many people are blessed to
find jobs because of good stewards who work hard to create wealth for society. Creating
wealth need not be just to escape poverty, but to enjoy Gods bounty and bless
many in the process. It is also good to intentionally take stock of the wealth
you create for your family wellbeing and the inheritance you want to pass on to
your children’s children.
FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT STRATEGY
The model here is based on the
fact that there are only four (five, if you add debt) things you can do with
money. The proportion in which you allocate and use your money in these areas
determines the quality of life you live today and directly determines the
quality of life you will have tomorrow. If you want to increase in wealth, you
may have to eliminate debt and start saving today. By adjusting your current
spending on operational expenses, you release money for investments that pay
you dividend in future. This section allows you to create a financial future
for your family by modeling your financial allocation today. However, you will
have to determine the financial adjustments you will make in the handling of money
and income that will allow you to achieve your financial goals.
MY ROLE & RESPONSIBILITY
No matter how gifted or talented
or endowed one partner may be, success cannot be enjoyed without equitable participation
and equal engagement in the process. While we emphasize corporate effort and
teamwork, it vital that both partners take up the full load they are able to
bear with the joy and commitment of equal engagement to achieve and enjoy the success
of any family initiative.
IMPLEMENTATION FRAMEWORK
Strategic goals can be set for
several years ahead, but monthly incomes, operational budgets and action plans need
to be broken down into objectives that can be set, implemented, monitored and reviewed
against timelines. In other words the family strategy is not in the document,
rather it is in the day-to-day action you take as a family to realize your
strategic goals. The unique and specific steps you will take cannot fit on the TOOLKIT
page. You will need to set specific steps you will take in the short term to
realize you long term goals. In this regard, the purpose of the review dates is
to create set times when progress of the whole strategy can be reviewed,
celebrated, revised and improved as necessary to ensure the family remains on
course to its goals.
SIGNING OFF
Signing commitment to the
strategy is a good way to record participation in the process and having a
friend to hold you accountable shows an even greater commitment to achieving
success. The document itself becomes a witness and a testimony of what you are
willing to work for and what you can trust God to bring about. Of course,
nothing can succeed without the blessing of God and it is always wise to commit
the whole project to Gods direction.
CONCLUSION
Once you have completed filling
in the TOOLKIT, read it through to enable you appreciate and take ownership of
the strategic focus you have created for you family.
In drawing up a family strategy,
you have taken a leap of faith and shown great courage in your willingness to
change, transform and advance your situation in life. Your job is now to follow
through with ACTION. Your steps will not be perfect, but you cannot copy
anybody else’s strategy to get better results. Your progress may be
incremental, but you can rejoice in every step of the way. Every familys’ journey is unique.
However, as stated earlier there
is a great deal of knowledge you still need to get the best possible results
out of the Family Strategy Toolkit, so get the book and attend the training workshop
for greater empowerment to achieve your goals in life.
Allan Bukusi, 2014
1. request
a free Family Strategy Toolkit to be sent to you,
2. order
a copy of the book (your will receive detail of the cost of the book plus
shipping)
3. esquire
when the next workshop will be held near you
4. Send
us feedback on your learning/ usage of concept of Family Strategy
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