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.
Fireside Chat with Dave Petersen and Dave Whorton
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.
Dave Petersen has been with this remarkable company for 40 years and CEO since 2008. In this Tugboat Institute® Fireside Chat with Dave Whorton, Dave shares his remarkable personal journey toward leadership of O.C. Tanner. O.C. Tanner’s remains guided by the founder, Obert Tanner’s, vision and plan, and Dave shares how that vision helped him guide the company through a great many remarkable re-inventions of itself.
Watch and learn about the journey of this impressive leader and the unique and impressive, Evergreen company he leads.
Make Change in Your Community Through Partnership With the Chamber of Commerce
Bobby Jenkins is President & CEO of ABC Home & Commercial Services, in Austin, TX. He is also deeply involved with his 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 getting involved with their local Chambers. He shares some examples from his own experience and highlights the fact that both Chambers of Commerce and Evergreen companies share a common goal: to make their communities better places. In addition, he shares some of the ways in which doing good is also good business.
Watch and be inspired to partner with your local Chamber of Commerce.
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.
Being a Guru
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 have predisposed notions of what the word “guru” means, in this short Tugboat Institute® talk, Ryan suggests a different way to think about the term. He explores the essence of the guru, which means “weighty” in Sanskrit, and he suggests methods for working towards becoming a guru. He further posits that this work will help us become better leaders, better care for our teams and ourselves, and create more good in our communities and the world.
Watch and be inspired to take some simple, concrete steps toward becoming a guru and finding stability and strength.
An Evergreen Twist on the PE Rollup
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 model for acquisitions. This “hybrid model” allowed him to build a business that is People First, that will always be Private, and that is in line with his values. His endeavor has been remarkably successful.
Watch and learn about a great example of how values can be at the center of a successful business, and how Evergreen is not only a viable, but a powerful alternative to the standard, Private Equity model.
Note: this presentation includes a few mild expletives
Creativity in Action: Using the Creative Process to Live a Life of Excellence
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 Murray's original piano compositions, either alone, with a group, or in nature, to learn to find peace in the moment and connect with the stillness and calm that help us see clearly, heal, and succeed.
In this Tugboat Institute® talk, Murray shares his perspective on creativity, which he believes is not a gift granted to a lucky few, but rather lives in all of us. Following his short talk, Murray invites us to sit back and lose ourselves, for a short time, in music as he performs live on our stage.
Watch, listen, and be inspired to connect with your own creativity and to seek and find peace and clarity as a source of strength.