Dear EJ Reader,

Happy New Year! We are delighted to join you in celebrating the end of one great year and the beginning of another at Tugboat Institute and the Evergreen Journal. Thank you for your passion, energy and dedication to our Evergreen community.

Reflections of the Past Year

Through the weekly distribution of the Evergreen Journal, we continued to chronicle important stories and ideas directly from our members. A heartfelt thank you to each of our EJ contributors for this tremendous gift you have given to our broader community.

In addition, we had a memorable 2016 with our Tugboat Institute Summit as well as our Fall Exemplar Visit at Jack Stack’s SRC in Springfield, MO. We’ve distributed talks from both events in the past few months and our library of talks will continue to grow through the new year.

We welcomed three new Tugboat team members: Dan Benetz as CFO, and Sean Zak and Jennifer Guo as Member Relations Managers for Tugboat Institute.

Lastly, we were honored to have a feature article about Tugboat Institute in Conscious Company Magazine in November. Meghan and Maren, the founders of the magazine, both joined us in Sun Valley last June and added to everyone’s experience.

Looking Ahead

From our perspective, 2017 is an important growth year for Tugboat Institute. The quality of our events, vitality of our community and health of Tugboat Institute are highly dependent on growing our community of value-aligned Evergreen leaders. We can’t overstate how important it is and how grateful we are to those who make valuable member candidate introductions.

New Innovations

Together, we’re continuing to co-create relevant and engaging innovations. We recently launched the Certified Evergreen™ program and encourage your management team and employees to participate. Certification gives your organization a publicly identifiable association with the highest business and operational standards that adhere to the Evergreen values.

Final Thoughts

All this is to say we have much to be proud of in our Evergreen community and Evergreen movement. Our efforts are destined to change the way society thinks about business. Evergreen entrepreneurs are building long-lasting, purpose-driven companies where success is something that is shared between owners and employees.

We look forward to a bright year ahead.

With Gratitude,

Dave & The Tugboat Team