Entrepreneurship Within the Family Business
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 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.
Watch and be inspired to see opportunities not just within, but also alongside of, your family business.
Keys to Building Resilience in Your Family, Your Business, and Yourself
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?
Watch and gain confidence as you strive to support and inspire resilience in your children, your employees, and yourself.
Innovating for the Long Term: 1728-2023
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 a global leader in filtration and energy storage systems, 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 and current Board Chair 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.
Watch and be inspired to up your game on the innovation front and ensure your survival for 100 years or more.
On Time
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 cannot escape a short term mindset, 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.
Watch and learn how and why time is on the Evergreen company's side.
Debunking Growth Myths
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.
Watch and learn how to tweak your strategy to increase your chances of successful, long-term growth.
Built on Values
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. She is also the author of the recent book, Built on Values. 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.
Watch and be inspired to take care of your teams and stay committed to your values throughout your company.
What Effective Executives Do
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.
Watch and be inspired to find new ways to increase your effectiveness.
Innovation by Reduction
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 trap’ and following fads that do not last.
Watch and be inspired by Don’s insightful and effective take on innovation.
Leading the Customer Experience
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 appreciate the role that fear can play in limiting performance and success in an organization. In this short Tugboat Institute talk, he reminds us how important it is to create a culture in our businesses where everyone - from the customer to the employee to the CEO - can operate free of fear.
Watch and be emboldened to help drive out the fear in your organization.
The Deming Philosophy and the Evergreen Mindset
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 formidable business competitors 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 day.
In this Tugboat Institute® talk, W. Edwards Deming’s grandson, Kevin Cahill, shares his grandfather’s philosophy and some of its central tenets, which happen to align nicely with the Evergreen 7Ps® principles, in particular People First. Today, Kevin is the Executive Director of the Deming Institute and a champion for his grandfather's important and highly relevant work.
Watch and learn about Deming's work and the incredible People First insights that helped him advise some of the world’s largest companies on their way to becoming giants in their industries.
