Dr. Allan Mishra is a leading orthopedic surgeon, an expert in stem-cell research, and a highly respected member of the team at Stanford University Medical Center. He is also the Founder of VyVerse, LLC, through which his program, Vitality Explorers, reaches a growing number of people. Dr. Mishra is deeply interested in human vitality, and in unlocking the keys to living a more vital and energized life. In this Tugboat Institute® talk, Dr. Mishra shares his expertise on vitality and helps us und...
Jan 11, 2024•21 min
Silicon Valley is known as the heartland of innovation in business, specifically venture capital and the ‘get big fast’ model of building a company toward a quick and lucrative exit. With its focus on growth over profit and its short-term time horizons, Silicon Valley's traditional business model is quite different then the Evergreen® model. It may, therefore, seem to be a strange place to choose to found and build an Evergreen company. Yet Mac Harman did just that when he launched Balsam Brands...
Dec 14, 2023•22 min
Stephen M.R. Covey has been a student of leadership his whole life; his father, Stephen R. Covey, was the author of the enormously popular book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Through his own work, which includes the NYT bestselling The Speed of Trust and more recently, Trust & Inspire: How Truly Great Leaders Unleash Greatness in Others, Stephen has spent his career observing and studying effective leadership and its hallmarks. His insights are profound. In this Tugboat Institute®...
Nov 30, 2023•22 min
Oscar Gonzalez is the youngest of 13 siblings. When he was very young, His father and a few of his brothers took the first step toward moving the entire family from Mexico to the United States. Through extraordinary perseverance, patience, and hard work, the entire Gonzalez clan eventually landed in Southern California, where the family business, Northgate Markets , was founded. In this Tugboat Institute® talk, Oscar shares the story of his father’s dream and the steps, which took years to unfol...
Nov 16, 2023•26 min
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 founded and support, aims to end genocide worldwide. In this Tugboat Institute® talk, John share...
Nov 02, 2023•11 min
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 each offered examples of what their first steps were and what progress they have made, in both the per...
Oct 19, 2023•31 min
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 like, and how far Howard Schultz was willing to go for his people. Listen and be inspired to care lik...
Oct 05, 2023•10 min
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 proposed that each time the defining motor of an economic era shifts, it takes us some time to unde...
Sep 21, 2023•23 min
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 business, and at the same time, enhance the family’s historic brand. In this Tugboat Institute® talk, Car...
Sep 07, 2023•21 min
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 wealthy families. In this Tugboat Institute® talk, Dr. Levine focuses on a skill that we all now acce...
Aug 24, 2023•21 min
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, innovation must be the order of the day. In this Tugboat Institute® talk, the 7th generation l...
Aug 10, 2023•20 min
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 of change and progress have accelerated, the timeframe of the Evergreen® company stands out as unique...
Jul 27, 2023•36 min
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 wisdom had it wrong. In this Tugboat Institute talk, Gary tackles several of the most pervasive myths ...
Jul 13, 2023•32 min
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 clear thinking about how great, values-led organizations function, the ways in which they put People...
Jun 01, 2023•29 min
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 accumulated significant wisdom. In this Tugboat Institute® talk, Jim shares the core of Drucker’s lessons ...
May 18, 2023•33 min
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 industry. Fast and frequent innovation is critical to survival in this industry, especially when y...
May 04, 2023•28 min
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 way to becoming a market-leading employee and customer appreciation software and consulting company. D...
Apr 20, 2023•1 hr 3 min
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 this short Tugboat Institute® talk, Bobby encourages Evergreen® business leaders to consider g...
Apr 06, 2023•7 min
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 gave him a piece of profound advice: drive out the fear! Many years later, Brad has come to fully appr...
Mar 23, 2023•8 min
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 Philosophy that he created, with its 14 principles, serves as a guide for a great many companies to this...
Mar 09, 2023•24 min
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 , proposes a way to think about this and some steps that may help you get started. Although many of us ...
Feb 23, 2023•8 min
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 what he learned from the PE playbook and infused it with his own Evergreen® beliefs to create a new mod...
Feb 09, 2023•30 min
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 every moment and connect with the stillness and calm that help us see clearly, heal, and succeed. In...
Jan 26, 2023•29 min
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 shares her considerable wisdom on this topic and introduces us to the Intentional Energetic Presence (...
Jan 12, 2023•25 min
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 of courage and community give her the strength to persevere, even in the most challenging of times. H...
Dec 15, 2022•23 min
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 core Evergreen values. In this Tugboat Institute talk, Dave shares his learning about the ways Evergre...
Dec 01, 2022•22 min
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 honoring the importance of women and introverts in leadership. As a thinker and a leader, Tom’s work ...
Nov 17, 2022•30 min
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 Tugboat Institute Summit. We asked him to give us an update this year. In this short Tugboat Institute...
Nov 03, 2022•7 min
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 McCullough shares some history of this remarkable company, from its humble beginnings to today. In a...
Oct 13, 2022•22 min
Dr. Dennis Jaffe has spent his career working with and advising family enterprises. A Senior Research Fellow at BanyanGlobal, he is widely considered to be one of the original architects of the field of family enterprise consulting. In this Tugboat Institute® podcast, Dr. Jaffe discusses the challenges that may arise when family business leaders start to imagine their children and grandchildren succeeding them. The questions that surround preparing the next generation to step into leadership are...
Sep 15, 2022•22 min
