The older European and American fortunes practised a discipline of not being interesting. The discipline was not the same as anonymity. The names were known in the relevant circles; the houses were known; the affiliations were known. What was not done was the active cultivation of public interest in the family or its affairs. The pattern was deliberate and was understood by those who maintained it.

The discipline had several elements. The family did not give interviews about its members. The family did not appear in publications that profiled wealthy people. The family did not photograph itself for the social pages. The family did not endorse or appear in commercial settings. The principal himself or herself, by long convention, was a poor subject for an article because the article, however well intentioned, would yield no interesting material.

The result was not invisibility. The result was a reduced presence in the kind of media that fed on people. The family was known; the family was, in a sense, not interesting. The picture available to a curious reader was the formal picture (the house, the holdings, the philanthropy, the relevant offices held) without the texture that draws sustained attention.

Some of the discipline survives in older families and in families consciously formed in the older pattern. Much of it has not survived the shift in media and in private behaviour. Where it does survive, it is recognisable: a family whose members make no statements, take no interviews, appear in no profiles, and whose holdings are arranged without obvious flourish.

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The desk does not invent the discipline; it cannot be invented after the fact in the same way it was once cultivated. It can, however, be advised on, in the sense that a family that wishes to recover some of the older pattern can be helped to identify what presently contradicts it and to consider what change is feasible. The work is calibrated to the family's situation rather than to an abstract ideal.