Evergreen Journal by Tugboat Institute

Change that is intentional and carefully managed over time is essential for the long term survival of a business. Katie Hopkins is the third generation President & CEO of her family’s business, Truck Centers, Inc. (TCI), and she has experienced this reality first hand. After many years of slow and steady growth, TCI entered into a partnership with their primary supplier, Daimler Trucks, and they have seen growth increase a great deal in the last decade. This rapid growth has required an increased focus on change as well.

In this Tugboat Institute® talk, Katie shares how TCI drove change, in their own business and across the Daimler group, by doubling down on their commitment to Change Management. The initial objective was to make the customer experience more standard across all Daimler locations, but the results reached far beyond this goal. In addition to serving as an example to the other dealerships in the group, above all else, Katie and her team have leaned into Change Management and Continuous Improvement as an effective and highly Evergreen® path to change and growth.

Listen and be inspired to be more intentional about driving and making change in your organization.

At some point, most of us will face the difficult challenge of talking to our parents about their care as they age. The conversation is almost always challenging because it entails the complete reversal of the dynamic of a life-long relationship, wherein the parent is the caregiver and the child is taken care of. But there are ways to make it easier.

In this Tugboat Institute® talk, Allen Serfas, Co-founder & President of Assistance Home Care, shares his deep personal and professional experience with this difficult conversation. He offers some helpful perspectives and advice for those of us preparing to approach it. It is possible, he believes, to get them the care they need, all while preserving and honoring their role as the parent in the relationship.

Listen and be empowered to help your parents get the care they need without conflict or strife.

Ben and Don MacAskill are the founders and CEO & President of Awesome, the company that owns SmugMug and Flickr, among other brands. They specialize in online tools and platforms for photography and have changed the way photographers store, share, and sell their work. A few years ago, when they purchased Flickr from Yahoo, they discovered something unexpected. 

In this Tugboat Institute® talk, Ben explains that he and Don were aware, of course, that Flickr owned and stored tens of billions of photos. But they soon also discovered that galleries, museums, and archives all over the world had also uploaded tens of millions of rare, unique, and historic photos. The power and impact of the collection struck them as important and absolutely unique, so they created a plan to ensure that these historic images never got lost to humanity. They created the Flickr Foundation. As they build the structure of this Foundation that is still only about a year old, they are focused on the goal of not just preserving the collection, but preserving it for the long term.

Listen and be inspired by this ambitious and generous initiative.

Dr. Peter Boumgarden is a professor at the WashU Olin School of Business. His research focuses on the role of structure- both formally and informally- in shaping the innovation of groups, organizations, and broader network systems. In addition to or perhaps as a byproduct of this work, he has also accumulated a wealth of wisdom about how individuals can be more effective and drive greater impact. Through his research as well as his work consulting and running executive education programs with organizations across sectors, he has developed a research-based set of recommendations for individuals seeking to make better use of their time.

In this Tugboat Institute talk, Peter begins by sharing that an average lifetime contains just 4000 weeks. If we want to maximize our impact – on our companies, our families, and our communities – we need to be strategic about how we spend our time. But the bottom line is that we are all different, and we need to find a strategy that works for us. Peter gives us tools to better understand our own productivity, and to think about how we can best tackle the challenge of being more strategic with our limited time.

Listen and think more clearly about how you organize your time.

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 understand how and why we should seek to move from exhaustion to energy. Our modern world provides many reasons to feel depleted and tired, but by posing a few simple, pointed questions and sharing research on a few fundamental keys to an energetic boost, Dr. Mishra gives us some tools to improve our energy and, thereby, our lives. 

Listen and take steps to become more vital and energize your life.

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 over ten years ago.

In this Tugboat Institute® talk, Mac shares how he not only resisted the pressures and norms of Silicon Valley, but how he was able to use them to his advantage. His combined personal, professional, and educational experiences taught him that he wanted to bootstrap his business rather than raise outside capital. However, he was able to glean some important pearls of wisdom from the standard Silicon Valley model and, paired with his own convictions and vision, build an industry-leading Evergreen company that continues to thrive - right where it started in Silicon Valley.

Listen and be inspired to take the Evergreen path, but leave space for relevant bits of wisdom from business leaders of all sorts.

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® talk, Stephen shares the core of his message from Trust & Inspire. According to Stephen, many of today’s leaders continue to operate in the style of yesterday’s leaders, which he calls Command & Control. However, the world has changed. Employees at all levels are motivated by Purpose and seek personal growth and fulfillment through their work. By tapping into this, each of us has the capacity to be great. The key to guiding us to our own greatness is leadership that leans into the Trust & Inspire style instead. 

Watch and understand the power of Trust & Inspire, and take away specific strategies to begin unleashing greatness in your team.

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 unfold, that made it a reality. Along with careful planning, dedicated hard work, and an entrepreneurial spirit, Oscar’s family succeeded thanks to their courage. Their deep, shared belief that their dream could become a reality gave them the faith they needed to take a few remarkable risks, or leaps of faith.

Listen and be inspired to take a risk for your dream, fueled by your own deep faith in its promise and possibility.

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 shares the work Bridgeway’s foundation has done since its founding to end genocide, first in Africa, and most recently in Ukraine. They were instrumental in making it possible to resume exports of grain from the Ukrainian ports last year, thus protecting millions of people worldwide from famine. Their story proves that even the most audacious goals can be attainable.

Listen and be inspired to take a risk for an audacious purpose.

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 personal and professional spheres, on this important topic. John Gavan has directed his efforts through LeaderFlow, an industry-based organization he co-founded to support upcoming, diverse leaders in the field of architecture, engineering, and construction. John Garrett’s efforts started on a more personal level and have led to realizations and new understandings that have and will continue to inform the way he runs his business. 

Mel deftly moderates this discussion, which not only offers ideas and inspiration to business leaders looking to learn and to take their first steps, but which also stands as proof that courageous and respectful conversations are possible. 

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 like you mean it.

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 understand and realize that we are no longer primarily selling our customers what we think we are selling them. In 1999, they proposed that we had progressed from a service economy to an experience economy. Now, Jim tells us, it has shifted again.

In this Tugboat Institute® talk, Jim expounds on his original theory. He then shares his updated thinking on the model. He proposes that today, most of us have caught up with the reality that what we’ve been primarily selling in recent decades is an experience, rather than a good or a service. However, we are lagging again. According to his model, while we may not yet realize it, the focus of our businesses has again shifted; we are now in a transformation economy.

Listen and understand what this might look like in your industry and company, and how you need to adjust your strategy to keep current.

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, Carrie shares the story of Pappy Van Winkle Bourbon and of the founding of her own company, Pappy & Company. As she and her sisters spun this company off the family brand, she learned powerful lessons about the importance of family harmony, clarity of brand identity, and entrepreneurship. 

Listen and be inspired to see opportunities not just within, but also alongside of, your family business.

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 accept as critical to survival in the modern world: resilience. As parents of children and as leaders of organizations, what can we do to foster this all-important skill in those we care about?

Listen and gain confidence as you strive to support and inspire resilience in your children, your employees, and yourself.

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 leader of Hollingsworth & Vose, Val Hollingsworth, shares highlights from his family’s company’s incredible journey. He also gives us insight into the spirit of innovation that has driven the company since its founding, and allowed it to remain relevant and a market-leader through sweeping changes to every aspect of our world. 

Listen and be inspired to up your game on the innovation front and ensure your survival for 100 years or more.

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.

For a company with outside investors and owners, such as public companies and Venture Capital and Private Equity backed companies, try as they might, they are beholden to a very short timeframe, as they must, over and over, ‘make the quarter.’ An Evergreen company, by contrast, can grow slowly, and therefore adhere to much longer timeframes. This long term mindset allows for the compounding not just of capital, but also culture, customer base, and more. Seen through this lens, time stands out as a primary strategic advantage of the Evergreen company.

Listen and learn how and why time is on the Evergreens’ side.

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 around company growth - the factors that are most often trumpeted as the keys to successful growth but that have not, in his vast experience, proven to be true. His work is grounded in thorough and exhaustive data, and as he debunks each myth, he offers an alternative truth that can help get you on the path to sustained Paced Growth.

Listen and learn how to tweak your strategy to increase your chances of successful, long-term growth.

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 First, and why this work is so central to their success.

Listen and be inspired to take care of your teams and stay committed to your values throughout your company.

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 for executives, as well as his own. Among his key takeaways, he advises leaders that in order to be an “effective executive,” one must be aware that one’s time tends to belong to others, and therefore it is critical to stop managing and start leading–to empower the team to do the work that they are trained to do and in which they excel.

Listen and be inspired to find new ways to increase your effectiveness. 

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 you are self-funded and competing against giants like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple. 

In this Tugboat Institute talk, Don shares his approach to innovation. Awesome exists in an environment where the pressure to adopt new ideas, one after the other, and stay ahead of the curve is intense, so he has found that it’s important to have some clear guide rails, to help them avoid falling into the ‘innovation trop’ and following fads that do not last.

Listen and be inspired by Don’s insightful and effective take on innovation.