Peter White '66 helps bring means and meaning together in the lives of the wealthy

You might recognize him from the full-page newspaper advertisement for Citigroup. Or you may know his name from his seminal work with the Rockefeller family. But from those profiles you probably wouldn't expect the type of financial advice he gives.

Peter A. White, Class of 1966, managing director of Family Advisory Practice at Citigroup Private Bank since November 1999, is a lecturer and consultant whose principal interest is helping people find meaning in the context of material abundance. As he says, "Once you have satisfied the basic survival needs, you must find meaning in your life. If you find meaning, the rest flows."

The promotional material for White's business states, "Getting the family to decide what it wants to do and where it wants to go is the sine qua non of effective consulting. Accordingly, our work stresses facilitation over advice. Because we have been working with an extraordinary clientele for over [fifteen] years we are able and happy to offer ideas and options based on the experience of others. But the real work is listening, making sure that everyone who has a stake in decisions also has a say, creating a safe place for the group to come together as people trying to solve a problem or reach an answer together, and moving the group toward resolution."

This holistic view began developing early in White's life. His family is from Cleveland, Ohio (his father's family was from Mount Vernon), but at the age of thirteen, White spent a summer in northern Colorado as a "guest hand" at Rawah Ranch. In his entrance essay for Kenyon, White referred to that period, remarking, "I learned that there were other things of value besides the material things on which we tend to place too much emphasis." Nonetheless, after graduating from the College, with honors in English, White appeared to be on the fast track to a life embellished with those material hallmarks of success.

After obtaining his law degree from Duke University, White clerked for the Hon. Kingsley A. Taft H'69, chief justice of the Ohio Supreme Court and father of Kenyon trustee David D. Taft '60 H'00. He spent the next sixteen years in the practice of law, including service with the Federal Trade Commission. In 1975, he joined Fulbright and Jaworski, working in the Washington, D.C., office of the Houston-based law firm. Shortly afterwards, Leon Jaworski, perhaps best known as a special prosecutor in the Watergate investigation, agreed to take over an investigation of charges that the Korean government had sought to bribe U.S. congressmen over a period of several years. After being dispatched to work out the details with the House of Representatives Ethics Committee, White served as Jaworski's deputy in the investigation.

"At thirty-two," read a 1977 article in the Scripps Howard newspapers, "Peter A. White has managed to scramble to the top of the legal ladder--a partnership in the fourth largest law firm in America." Although these credentials brought clout to White as deputy counsel for the House Ethics Committee, he commented that "one of the most sensitive parts of any corporate law practice comes down to ethical considerations. Anyone who deals in the corporate area has to be familiar with them. And that's what this investigation is about." Ethics was becoming White's primary interest.

But White says he was discovering "a dissatisfaction with my life practicing law, a life focused on success and making money," even as the external accouterments compounded. "It wasn't fulfilling. After chasing success but not finding happiness, I took a step back. It was an evolutionary process but I made fairly radical changes in the way I was living."

White chose to employ his talents where his heart clearly lay. In 1986, while remaining of counsel to Fulbright and Jaworski, he founded International Skye Associates, Inc., a firm that provided personal counseling services and specializes in rendering services in the field of private wealth and philanthropy. White and his associates stressed "taking advantage of opportunities and solving problems according to the needs and goals of each family as defined by them, integrating modern thinking about business and finance with timeless wisdom from religion, philosophy, and the social sciences."

In the first year, the Rockefeller Family Office hired White to study the offices of seven other families because it wanted to get new management ideas. In 1987, he convened a meeting of the representatives from the eight family offices and three others iinterested in joining the group. "The first item on the agenda was that everybody around the table would talk about his family office and the challenges he saw," White says. "That item alone took one full day. I could see that I was pretty good at engendering this sort of conversation."

International Skye evolved in subsequent years from family office issues to the human issues White had faced in his own life and began to focus on the problem of finding meaning in lives of great material abundance. A decade later, a reporter from Town and Country, in an article featuring White, commented, "Wealth consultants come from the sorts of disciplines you might expect: insurance, accounting, law, banking, psychology. But they no longer merely invest money, write wills, or straighten out misdirected scions. Wealth consultants look beyond the borders of their old disciplines, taking a more holistic view."

White's concerns led him to expand the services of International Skye, offering the Skye Summer Institute, an educational program centered on responsibility and competence in living a complete and purposeful life. The program, for young adults who had inherited considerable wealth, featured workshops on asset management, discussions of community activism, and seminars on human issues like leadership and fear, as well as fun dude ranch activities among their peers. One Summer Institute attendee, an heir to the General Electric Company fortune, remarked that White's "emphasis on finding meaning in their lives--and not focusing on their money--helps them evolve from being merely wealthy people to being wealthy with a cause to spend their money on."

Aside from its seminars, International Skye held annual meetings of clients and program participants focusing on selected topics such as "commitment" and sponsors periodic volunteer projects, such as building houses with Habitat for Humanity, working on reforestation projects in Guatemala, or replanting grasses on eroded Florida land. In White's opinion, you can "indoctrinate people when they are young, or you can shame them when they are older, but real philanthropy comes from a feeling of being connected to the world and realizing that the world is hurting in many ways and that one can do something to alleviate that hurt."

White was a senior adviser to Bankers Trust Company from 1992 to 1999, designing and developing a program called "Wealth with Responsibility." Expanding this role as an educator, White served from 1997 to 2000 as a visiting professor of ethics and family enterprise at Stetson University in Deland, Florida, and as the founding director of the Stetson Family Business Center, looking at family business and philanthropic enterprises through an ethical prism. Noting that "liberal arts is right at the heart of teaching about the connection between abundance and meaning," he is now a resident scholar in liberal studies at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, teaching an intensive-study course for undergraduates called "Coming into Your Own," an experiential process designed to complement the overall education program by dealing directly with self-realization.

"Kenyon was profoundly influential on the way I see the world today," says White, who is a trustee of the Kenyon Review, a regular participant in its summer Writers Workshop, and the father of a recent graduate of the College, U.S. Navy Ensign Michael A. White '01. "My experience studying literature at Kenyon opened my eyes, and it has helped me keep them open in a day when it is so much easier to close them."

"Those who are most interested in philanthropy are the people who have, in effect, come to grips with what's important to them in life," White noted in a 1997 article in the Chronicle of Philanthropy. "They are better able to extend out of their own immediate needs to think about the larger needs of the world."

Many people believe White has been his own best student.

-Alice Cornwell Straus '75