Dissect a Dissertation: The Wealth Quarterback Illusion

Part 3/20 of the Dissecting a Dissertation series

Dissecting a Dissertation explores the structural tensions within modern wealth management. Based on my doctoral research at SDA Bocconi, the series examines why holistic advisory work remains difficult to deliver in practice.

My previous article showed why advisory firms market holistic governance while delivering transactional services and how decoupling between formal structures and actual operations keeps the gap in place. But that analysis focused on the individual firm. What happens when a family assembles multiple advisors and asks them to work together?

This article looks at the coordination dimension of that challenge: why individually highly capable advisory teams struggle to integrate into a coherent strategy — and why the commonly used “quarterback” model rarely resolves it.

Coordination Without Integration

You’ve assembled a championship roster: a tax advisor, estate planner, wealth manager, and corporate counsel. Each excels in their domain. Yet when asked to work together, their strategies collide and fragment the overall plan.

The estate plan contradicts the investment mandate. The tax strategy undermines the family’s philanthropic goals. The wealth manager and lawyer are working at cross-purposes, each optimising for their own technical domain while your family’s overarching strategy fragments beneath them.

The idea that a team of experts can combine their knowledge into a superior strategy is as appealing as the synergy effects when a company takes over another. Put all the right people in one room, and integration should follow. In practice, it rarely does.

The Quarterback Illusion

When families encounter this coordination problem, the industry typically responds by appointing a “lead advisor” or “quarterback” to coordinate the group. The assumption is straightforward: centralise responsibility, schedule regular meetings, and ensure information flows between disciplines.

This rests on a misunderstanding of professional service delivery. Meetings alone do not create alignment. When underlying economic incentives are misaligned, advisors return to their silos as soon as the meeting ends.  

Appointing a quarterback applies an administrative solution to an economic problem.

What Actually Happens in the Room

Here’s what the research reveals about those carefully orchestrated multidisciplinary meetings.

Haag et al. (2024) demonstrated that specialists, particularly legal and tax advisors, actively resist holistic integration. They prefer to operate within what Haag calls “bounded assignments”: clearly defined, specialised tasks (drafting a specific contract, completing a tax return) that carry no expectation or liability for the broader family context. By staying within their technical domain, they create a fragmented environment where no single advisor ensures the various legal and financial instruments are actually coordinated.

Beyond bounded assignments, territorial behaviour also plays a role. In an interview, Léon Danco, the founding father and a pioneer in the family business consulting field, highlighted that when different disciplines meet with a family business owner, the major problem is turf (Sidwell, 1989). If advisors cannot reach a combined professional judgment, they end up fighting over jurisdiction, the cost of which is borne by the family. Strike (2013) found that many advisors deliberately refuse to recommend other specialists or share information because their primary objective is to keep the family captive and maintain exclusive control over the client relationship.

When multidisciplinary teams do function effectively, the literature reveals a specific mechanism. Kaye and Hamilton (2004) explain that a highly functioning team requires pairing “content” experts (law, tax, finance) with “process” experts (psychologists, facilitators). In meetings, this combination prevents what Kaye and Hamilton call “premature agreement.” 

In practice, a technical expert may present a well-designed legal structure and interpret the family’s quiet nodding as consent. A process expert, attuned to group dynamics, intervenes to surface unspoken concerns.

Without this intervention, technical solutions often proceed without challenge, and underlying reservations emerge later during implementation.

Kaye and Hamilton further argue that genuine integration requires a “practised partnership” built over multiple cases, not ad-hoc groups of random specialists assembled for a single meeting. Advisors must develop enough familiarity and mutual trust to seamlessly pass the baton during a conversation, knowing when to pursue an unplanned emotional digression and when to block it, without needing explicit, visible coordination. Su and Dou (2013) confirm that structural mechanisms facilitating deep, ongoing knowledge sharing among advisors from different disciplines are a prerequisite for elevating the overall quality of family business services.

These coordination failures reflect how the underlying economic structure undermines professional service delivery.

The Economic Architecture of Fragmentation

The previous article explored how decoupling operates within a single firm — how advisory organisations market holistic care while their internal structures reward transactional delivery. But when a family assembles advisors from different firms and different disciplines, a new layer of structural friction emerges: the advisors sitting around the same table are compensated by entirely different economic models, each pulling behaviour in a different direction.

The advisors in their “integrated team meeting” operate under fundamentally different compensation models. Wealth managers are typically compensated based on assets under management, aligning their incentives with asset growth and portfolio activity. Foerster et al. (2017) and Linnainmaa et al. (2021) show that advisor behaviour often reflects internal preferences and standardised practices rather than the specific needs of individual clients. Time spent on family governance or cross-professional coordination does not fit easily into the quarterback model. It is difficult to bill, difficult to measure, and often deprioritised – despite its importance to the overall outcome.

Conversely, Haag et al. (2024) show that lawyers and accountants on hourly or fixed fees tend to operate within “bounded assignments”: clearly defined technical tasks. Work that extends beyond that scope, such as engaging in broader family dynamics, is often treated as “scope creep” and avoided because it reduces profitability.

Wealth managers are incentivised to grow assets, while lawyers and accountants are incentivised to complete clearly defined technical tasks efficiently. These models are structurally misaligned.

When a quarterback is appointed — often the wealth manager — they are expected to coordinate professionals whose incentives differ from their own. The meeting becomes performative: advisors align briefly, then return to their respective silos, each optimising for their firm’s incentives while families seek long-term continuity.

The quarterback model, then, is not simply another example of decoupling within a firm. It is the inter-firm manifestation of the same structural logic: a ceremonial response to market demand for integration, layered on top of economic architectures that actively prevent it.

A ceremonial title cannot override this economic reality.

For the Family: Move from Ceremony to Architecture

Move beyond the quarterback model. Instead, architect genuine integration:

Compensate for the coordination burden. The fundamental flaw in the quarterback model is expecting unpaid labour. If you want a lead advisor managing a multi-disciplinary team, carve out a distinct, explicit retainer or consulting fee dedicated to cross-professional synthesis. AUM fees pay for asset management, not for coordinating lawyers and accountants. Separate them.

Demand a process expert in the room. Kaye and Hamilton’s research is clear: a team of content experts without a process expert will produce “premature agreement” — technical solutions that sail through unchallenged while the family’s real concerns go unspoken. Insist that your multidisciplinary meetings include someone whose explicit role is to read the room, surface unvoiced objections, and ensure that quiet nodding doesn’t masquerade as genuine alignment.

Establish jurisdictional authority. In a room full of experts, ambiguity breeds turf wars. A quarterback without authority is just a meeting scheduler. Explicitly define to all parties who holds ultimate mandate for strategic alignment. The other advisors must know the lead advisor has your proxy to question their siloed recommendations for the sake of a broader family strategy.

Build around a shared framework. Build around a shared framework. Advisors often operate with different definitions of success. Before discussing technical solutions, align them around a documented family philosophy. If the wealth manager optimises for capital growth while the estate planner focuses on tax efficiency, their strategies will inevitably collide. Anchor them to a shared brief. The Family Council Canvas can support this process by aligning advisors around the family’s vision and structuring conversations to surface what would otherwise remain unspoken.

Shift from reporting to joint problem-solving. The typical joint advisor meeting is a reporting ceremony — each professional updates the room on what they’ve already decided. Change this entirely. Present a complex, upcoming family challenge and require the team to debate the trade-offs in real time. Force them out of their silos into integrated problem-solving.

For the Advisor: Earn the Title

The quarterback role requires acting as what Bertschi-Michel, Sieger & Kammerlander (2021) describe as a tertius iungens — the third who joins — actively brokering connections between specialists rather than exploiting your central position to keep parties divided:

Build a practised partnership rather than assembling ad-hoc teams. Kaye and Hamilton’s research shows that assembling random specialists for a single meeting rarely produces integration. Invest in developing a stable team whose members have worked together across multiple cases and have developed the mutual trust to seamlessly coordinate in real time.

Protect the coordination time. Build explicit, billable time for cross-professional work into your service model. You cannot integrate other advisors’ recommendations without spending hours synthesising their technical positions. That labour should be compensated and visible.

Use the joint meeting for decision-making, not reporting. Change the structure radically. Instead of each advisor reporting on what they’ve completed, present a new, complex family challenge that requires the team to think together in real time. This forces integration instead of allowing retreat to bounded assignments.

Name the economic misalignment. Be honest with the family about the structural reality. Their wealth manager is compensated to capture assets, not coordinate colleagues. Their estate lawyer compensated to execute bounded assignments, not to consider how their structure impacts liquidity. Until these economic misalignments are explicitly acknowledged and addressed, no amount of meeting scheduling will produce genuine integration.

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The Coordination Question

The quarterback illusion persists because we assume coordination follows from assembling the right experts.

But where the previous article showed how decoupling operates within the firm, this article reveals how the same logic operates between firms: each advisor optimises for their own economic model, and the quarterback title becomes the ceremonial bridge over a structural chasm.

Without structural alignment — economic, jurisdictional, and strategic — the result is a costly coordination exercise with limited integration.

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Stay tuned as I continue unpacking the research, and subscribe to our newsletter to follow the full Dissecting a Dissertation series.

References:

Bertschi-Michel, A., Sieger, P., & Kammerlander, N. (2021). Succession in family-owned SMEs: The impact of advisors. Small Business Economics: An Entrepreneurship Journal, 56(4), 1531–1551. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-019-00266-2

Haag, K., Almlöf, H., Madsen, M.B. and Neville, M., 2024. Legal advisors and family business owners: A transaction cost understanding of “the ownership contract.” Family Business Review (or insert correct journal if different), 37(2), pp.292-314. DOI: 10.1177/08944865231217882

Kaye, K. and Hamilton, S., 2004. Roles of trust in consulting to financial families. Family Business Review, 17(2), pp.151–163. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-6248.2004.00010.x

Foerster, S., Linnainmaa, J.T., Melzer, B.T. and Previtero, A., 2017. Retail financial advice: Does one size fit all? The Journal of Finance, 72(4), pp.1441–1482. https://doi.org/10.1111/jofi.12514 

Linnainmaa, J. T., Melzer, B. T., & Previtero, A. (2021). The Misguided Beliefs of Financial Advisors. The Journal of Finance, 76(2), 587–621. https://doi.org/10.1111/jofi.12995

Sidwell, P. (1989). An Interview with Léon Danco. Family Business Review, 2(4), 381–400. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-6248.1989.tb00006.x

Strike, V.M., 2013. The most trusted advisor and the subtle advice process in family firms. Family Business Review, 26(3), pp.293–313. https://doi.org/10.1177/0894486513492547

Su, E. and Dou, J., 2013. How does knowledge sharing among advisors from different disciplines affect the quality of the services provided to the family business client? An investigation from the family business advisor’s perspective. Family Business Review, 26(3), pp.279–292. https://doi.org/10.1177/0894486513491978