Evergreen Journal by Tugboat Institute

John Montgomery, Founder & CEO of Bridgeway Capital Management, manages risk for his clients for a living. However, he noticed long ago that even the most audacious business leaders tend to take much smaller risks outside of business. Given the string of human catastrophes he has watched unfold and learned about in his lifetime, he decided to set the bar higher. Bridgeway, and the non-profit they...

At Tugboat Institute® Summit 2023, Tugboat members John Gavan and John Garrett joined Mel Gravely on the stage to share the learnings and actions they have taken themselves in the two years since Mel's first Tugboat Institute talk, What We Can Do Together About Race?   Instead of being directive about what any of us should or should not be doing to help close the rights gap by race, John and John...

Howard Behar joined Starbucks as President of North America in the very early days of the company. He learned quickly that as a leader, CEO Howard Schultz truly cared for the company's people, from its employees to its customers.  In this Tugboat Institute® talk, Howard shares the stories of two men named Jim, a customer and an employee. The stories illustrate what "caring like you mean it" looks...

James H. Gilmore is the co-Founder of Strategic Horizons, LLC, a thinking group that helps businesses imagine and design new ways to add value to their economic offerings. In 1999, he co-authored the book The Experience Economy with Joseph Pine II. In it, they introduced their groundbreaking framework for understanding the progression of economic value over the course of modern human history. They...

In her native Kentucky, the bourbon created by Carrie Van Winkle Greener's great-grandfather, Pappy Van Winkle, is legend. Carrie's older brother stepped into the family business, the Old Rip Van Winkle Distillery, at the start of his career but Carrie and her two sisters, who are triplets, sought their own opportunities elsewhere. Until, that is, they perceived an opportunity to start a new busin...

Dr. Madeline Levine is co-Founder of Challenge Success and a leading psychologist who has focused a great deal of her work on the mental health and challenges of young people coming of age in our modern society. In particular, in her book The Price of Privilege , she addressed a group that has been largely dismissed as being 'fine,' but that is not, in fact, free from challenges: the children of w...

Hollingsworth & Vose is the oldest company in Tugboat Institute® membership; they were founded nearly 300 years ago. In their early days, they made paper for customers including Ben Franklin and Paul Revere. Today, they are the leading producer of filtration systems for energy and other purposes, and their customers include Tesla and Elon Musk. It goes without saying that to survive such a journey...

At Tugboat Institute® Summit 2023, where we celebrated our ten year anniversary, CEO Dave Whorton shared a talk entitled On Time. Dave first set the context of human activity in the broad span of life on our planet; as a species, we have been around for an extremely short time. Then he zeroed in on the timeframe of business, since it truly came to exist. In the past couple centuries, as the pace o...

Before joining the team at Tugboat Institute®, Dr. Gary Kunkle spent many years consulting with companies, in the United States and abroad, on growth. Following a stint at KPMG and then as the leader of his own company in the Netherlands, Gary returned to the US to earn his PhD. He wanted to understand what truly drove company growth, since his experience had led him to believe the conventional wi...

Ann Rhoades has made her career at values-led organizations. She served as Chief People Officer at Southwest Airlines, then as Co-founder of JetBlue, and now PRES of People Ink. Through all of this work, she has pioneered the shift in our modern perception of the role of Human Resources in a company, and the importance of people to any organization.  In this Tugboat Institute® talk, Ann shares her...

Jim Weddle worked at Edward Jones for 43 years, and served as Managing Partner from 2009 to 2018. During his time with the firm, he worked with Peter Drucker, creator of the Drucker Principles and author of The Effective Executive , as both an advisor and a client. Between lessons learned from his time spent with Drucker and his own learnings as leader of a large Evergreen® company, Jim has accumu...

Tugboat Institute® member Don MacAskill is the CEO & Chief Geek of Awesome, which owns the brands SmugMug and Flickr. Don founded SmugMug with his brother, Ben, and together they bootstrapped their online photo sharing company, purchased Flickr from Yahoo, and built their company into an industry leader. All this from the heart of Silicon Valley and in the highly competitive and fast-paced tech in...

O.C. Tanner is a 95 year old family business in Salt Lake City, Utah. Not only are they an Evergreen® company with a deeply People First orientation, their entire business model exists to find ways to help other companies honor and support their employees and customers. They started making trophies, rings, and plaques to reward graduates and excellence in the workplace, and have innovated their wa...

Bobby Jenkins is President & CEO of ABC Home & Commercial Services, in Austin, TX. He is also deeply involved with the local Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber of Commerce in Austin, like so many others, is at the center of all that makes Austin a wonderful place to live and do business, including a great many programs and initiatives that are supported by and that can support local companies.   In...

Tugboat Institute® member Brad Cleveland is a global expert in customer strategy and management. His recent book, Leading the Customer Experience, along with his LinkedIn Learning Courses and numerous articles, have been translated into a dozen languages. He is a sought after speaker and consultant worldwide. When Brad was a young man, he had the opportunity to speak with W. Edwards Deming, who ga...

W. Edwards Deming is universally recognized as one of the fathers of Total Quality Management. His groundbreaking work helped numerous Japanese companies, with whom he consulted in the period following WWII, improve their efficiency and performance and surge onto the world scene as a formidable business competitor in the 1970s and 1980s. American companies caught on eventually, and the Deming Phil...

It is no secret that business leaders and leaders of all sorts are experiencing high levels of burnout and stress, especially coming off the last extremely challenging few years. Most leaders are aware, at least on some level, of the importance of self-care, yet many struggle to turn that understanding into concrete action. Ryan Redman, Founder and Executive Director of the Flourish Foundation , p...

Early in his career, the dental group Samson Liu worked for sold to Private Equity (PE). He stayed on for 18 years, as the company was sold and re-sold over and over again. Eventually, it became clear that the practices and mindsets of the PE model were not in line with Samson's values, so he left to start his own practice, SOH Dental. In this Tugboat Institute® talk, Samson shares how he took wha...

Murray Hidary began his career as a tech entrepreneur, before a personal tragedy redirected his focus back to music, a lifelong passion. His work using music to heal and improve his own mindset led him to found his current company, MindTravel . MindTravel invites listeners to immerse themselves in his original piano compositions, either alone, with a group, or in nature, to learn to find peace in...

Anese Cavanaugh is the Founder and CEO of Active Choices, Inc. , creator of the IEP Method , and the author of numerous books. The many tools she has developed and honed are all aimed at achieving the same goal; helping leaders take better care of themselves so they can build better companies, with cultures that thrive, and that create impact in the world. In this Tugboat Institute® talk, Anese sh...

Tugboat Institute® member Courtney McKee has experienced a series of enormous challenges in her life, both personal and professional, but she has overcome them all. Her secret weapons are her resilience and her Perseverance, both of which are fueled by her strong sense of Purpose. In this Tugboat Institute talk, Courtney shares some of the challenges she has faced and overcome and how her values o...

Tugboat Institute® member Dave Thrasher grew up watching his father found and build a company. When it came time for him to step into leadership, Dave was ready to take what his father had built and scale it. In the end, he founded his own offshoot of his father's Evergreen® company, which is run today by his brother Dan, and he started the work of scaling, always with an eye to maintaining his co...

In this candid conversation, Tugboat Institute® Founder & CEO Dave Whorton and Tom Peters , discuss the eight main principles of Tom's seminal book, In Search of Excellence . They explore the ways in which Tom's thinking has evolved in the years since its publication. All of the eight People First principles remain relevant and valuable, and Tom introduces some important new ideas, including honor...

The conversation about race in our society is difficult but it is extremely important. Tugboat Institute® member Mel Gravely, CEO of TriVersity Construction, has not only spent a lot of time thinking about it, he has written a book about it. In 2021, he shared lessons and insights from his book, Dear White Friend: The Realities of Race, the Power of Relationships, and Our Path to Equity, at our Tu...

When the artisan jewelers at James Avery create their pieces, they aim to make keepsakes that are imbued with meaning and that will be cherished by customers for a lifetime, if not more. Throughout Texas and beyond, their jewelry is often passed down from generation to generation. This deeply Evergreen® company is beloved by customers and employees alike.  In this Tugboat Institute® talk, CEO John...