The hardest delegation decision I have ever made was not about a company. It was about my own money — and, if I’m honest, about a part of my identity I wasn’t fully ready to release.
I have spent a long career deciding where capital should go — across international banking, insurance brokerage, industrial investment groups, and the leadership of investment and family office vehicles. For decades, my identity was inseparable from that act of judgment: reading a management team, sizing a private equity position, timing an entry or an exit, arguing a thesis with a private banker until one of us blinked. My personal wealth was never just a balance sheet. It was a craft I practised daily, hands-on, in close coordination with private banks and external managers. The portfolio and I were, in a sense, colleagues who had grown up together.

So when I recently accepted the role of chief executive of a large, international, diversified holding company headquartered in Europe, the decision that surprised people close to me — and quietly tested me — was not that I took the job. It was what I did with my own capital afterwards. I moved it — the private equity positions, the liquid investments, the whole architecture — under a discretionary mandate managed by dedicated professional teams within my family office. I stepped back from running my own money.
Let me be clear about the motive, because it matters deeply to me. I did not take the CEO role for money. Wealth at this level generates seven- and eight-figure annual returns on its own; the marginal financial incentive of a salary is, frankly, noise. I took the job for the interest, the intellectual challenge, and the sheer scale of the problems it puts in front of me. But precisely because money was not the reason, I owed my capital — and myself — an honest answer to a different question: who is actually going to look after this properly now?

Attention is the only budget that does not replenish

The economist Herbert Simon observed in 1971 that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Nowhere is that truer than in the corner office. When Harvard Business School’s Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria tracked 27 CEOs of large companies — firms averaging $13.1 billion in annual revenue — for nearly 60,000 hours, in a study published as “How CEOs Manage Time” in the July–August 2018 Harvard Business Review, they found the average chief executive worked 62.5 hours a week, spent 72% of that time in meetings, and conducted business on the majority of weekend and vacation days. The job, in their word, is “relentless.” They also found something more subtle: CEOs advanced their own deliberate agenda only 43% of the time; the remaining hours were reactive, consumed by whatever the world threw at them that day.

You cannot read those numbers and still believe you will find the quiet hours to actively manage a complex private portfolio. I have made bad investment decisions in my life, but I have never made a good one while distracted. Splitting my attention between a demanding executive mandate and my own deal-making would not have been diligence. It would have been vanity dressed as diligence — and a slow-motion disservice to both.
There is a humbling body of evidence here that every self-directed investor should sit with. In their landmark 2000 Journal of Finance study, Brad Barber and Terrance Odean examined 66,465 households with accounts at a large discount broker between 1991 and 1996 and found that those who traded most earned 11.4% annually while the market returned 17.9%. Their conclusion, stated plainly, was that “trading is hazardous to your wealth,” with overconfidence the primary culprit. The broader active-versus-passive record is no kinder: S&P Dow Jones Indices’ SPIVA U.S. Year-End 2024 Scorecard reports that over the fifteen years to December 2024 there were no equity categories in which a majority of active managers outperformed — zero of 22 categories, with more than 90% of large-cap funds lagging their benchmark. The lesson is not that skill is worthless. It is that unfocused, part-time, ego-driven activity is a reliable way to destroy value. If I would not tolerate that pattern in a business I run, why would I tolerate it in my own name?
When wealth becomes an institution, it deserves institutional management

Somewhere along the way, my capital stopped being a portfolio and became something closer to an institution — with its own liabilities, obligations, time horizon, and stakeholders. This realization was humbling. Institutions are not run on instinct and evenings. They are run on governance. That realisation reframed the whole question. The professionalisation I was contemplating for myself is exactly the direction the entire field is moving: Deloitte Private’s 2024 study “Defining the Family Office Landscape,” which surveyed 354 single family offices, found that 66% of respondents expect family offices to become “more institutionalized and professionally managed.” And yet the same industry reveals how far principals still have to travel. UBS’s Global Family Office Report 2024, drawing on 320 single family offices with an average net worth of USD 2.6 billion, found that only 56% of family offices have an investment committee and just 44% have a documented investment process; separately, a Citi survey reported by Crain Currency found that about 48% of family offices do not have an investment policy statement at all.

I did not want to be part of that unstructured majority. So the move was, at heart, a deeply personal governance decision.
The mechanism is a discretionary mandate. It is worth being precise about what that means, because the distinction is the whole point. Under an advisory mandate, the professional recommends and the principal approves every transaction — nothing moves without your sign-off. Under a discretionary mandate, you grant the manager authority to buy, sell, and rebalance within agreed parameters, and they report to you afterwards. Advisory keeps your hands on the wheel; discretionary hands the wheel to a trusted pilot to whom you have given the destination, the route, and the limits.

The document that encodes all of that is the Investment Policy Statement. Mine is the closest thing I have to a written constitution for my wealth: return objectives, risk tolerance, asset-allocation ranges, liquidity needs, concentration limits, and the protocols for escalating anything that breaches them. It is the encoding of my philosophy so that others can act on it faithfully when I am not in the room — which, as a CEO, is most of the time. Around it sits the ordinary machinery of good governance: an investment committee, a defined reporting cadence, benchmarks, and clear lines of accountability. The point of that machinery is not bureaucracy for its own sake. It is to convert informal preferences into documented policy, and policy into portfolio reality, in a way that survives my absence and outlasts my moods.

I built the structure deliberately across two hubs — one team in Zurich, one in Singapore, the leading wealth centres of Europe and Asia. It gives me time-zone and jurisdictional diversification, genuine access to both Western and Asian markets, and the healthy discipline of two professional teams operating under a single mandate framework, each a check on the other. Switzerland offers the institutional continuity, rule of law, and monetary stability that make it a natural anchor for long-duration preservation; Singapore offers the regulatory coherence, proximity, and time-zone alignment that make it an engine for Asian market execution. Run together under one policy, they are, in miniature, the same logic of decentralised execution and centralised strategy I apply at the holding company.

Delegation is not abdication

There is also a cleaner conscience in this arrangement. A CEO of a large diversified group is forever brushing against potential conflicts of interest. Stepping back from active personal trading and deal-making removes a whole category of awkward questions before they can be asked. It is the same fiduciary instinct that leads executives toward blind trusts and pre-cleared trading arrangements: the aim is not only to avoid impropriety but to avoid its very appearance, which in a leadership role can be almost as costly.

But — and this is the distinction I hold onto — delegation is not abdication. The worst thing a leader can do is hand something off and vanish; that is not delegation, it is neglect wearing delegation’s clothes. I did not stop caring about my wealth; I stopped executing it. I remain fully engaged at the level of strategy and governance: I set the policy, I chair the reviews, I interrogate the benchmarks, I own the outcomes. What I have surrendered is the transaction, not the direction. That is precisely what I ask of my best executives — own the result, don’t make me do your job — and it would be incoherent to demand it of them while refusing it of myself.

In the end, this was the most personal leadership lesson of taking the role. The discipline you expect of a well-run enterprise is not something you switch on at the office and off at home. Taking a demanding job obliges you to give your own capital the same governance you would demand of any institution you lead. Letting go of the wheel, it turns out, was not a loss of control. It was an act of deeper self-awareness — and the most controlled decision I have made in years.