Your heritage shapes who you are. Especially if your home sprawls across 825,000 acres in South Texas, is populated with 60,000 cattle and 300 Quarter horses - not to mention several oil and gas wells, and is larger than the state of Rhode Island. That larger-than-life heritage dramatically shaped Sally Kleberg's life, her future, and prompted her to pen her first book, The Stewardship of Private Wealth: Managing Personal and Family Financial Wealth.

Sally Kleberg is a descendant of Captain Richard King who founded the King Ranch in 1853. Even today, 145 years later, the King Ranch remains one of the largest ranches in the world and is regarded as the birthplace of the American ranching industry.

The King Ranch has a well-deserved place in the heritage of the American Southwest. Through the years of its history, the ranch developed two distinguished breeds of cattle: the Santa Gertrudis and the Santa Cruz and produced the first American Quarter horse.

Today the ranch produces grain and cotton and has over 2,500 oil and gas wells, a 15,000-head feed lot and its own computerized feed mill.

There were five original children in the King family: two boys and three girls. But after her siblings decided not to follow in the family business, Alice King, Sally's great grandmother, decided she would become involved in ranching. Alice married Captain King's lawyer, Robert Kleberg, a descendant of a prominent German family who had settled in Texas in the 1830s. Robert and Alice had five children, and until 1954, the King Ranch was owned equally by the five children from this union.

Through a series of circumstances, only three branches and a percentage of a fourth remain in the business today. Counting children and spouses, there are 143 shareholders and owners that remain. The first member of the seventh generation was born in 1994.

Being a fifth-generation member of the King family, it is not the cattle or the oil or the horses or the land that occupies Sally Kleberg's attention these days. It is the responsibility of being a good steward of the wealth that the ranch and its enterprises continue to produce.

"From its inception, the King Ranch was built on the vision of being stewards of the land, the people, the expertise, the community and the world. Descendants were taught to believe that stewardship should be thoughtful, wise, effective and committed to the next generation" says Sally.

The King Ranch stands as an outstanding example of a successful family business. But according to Sally, it has not been without its problems. In her book, The Stewardship of Private Wealth, Sally addresses both the 'soft' as well as the 'hard' issues related to wealth management. She was motivated to write the book because of what she has had to learn on her own as a woman about handling her portion of the family resources.

Sally feels strongly that family members must communicate with each other and with their kids about the responsibilities and expectations that go with wealth. Her book is directed to women who are either new to the business world or are inheritors of wealth. Sally said, "I found that in my family the women were expected to be educated, to be supportive and to pull their own weight. But not to rock the boat."

Kleberg believes that in the past, women have not been treated equally in the family business. Unless they have specific experience and training for a certain job, they have virtually no opportunity or encouragement to take a position within the family business. That is not the case with men, she observes, who are often appointed to positions in the family business with varying levels of preparation. Sally intended the book primarily to serve as a guide for women and children of wealthy families to help them understand financial planning on their own, but it equally informs the men who have limited knowledge of personal asset management.

Communication and planning are the keys to managing wealth. She has shared what she has learned in the hopes that others won't have to make the same mistakes she has made. Sally is convinced that anyone can confront the special problems that wealth presents and be successful at the imperatives of financial and long-term, multigenerational planning.