Book Review: Whorton Champions A Different Kind Of Capitalism

Forbes

30-05-2025

Book cover
Harvard Business Publishing
In 2015, Inc. magazine made a choice that now reads like a parable. A profile of Dave Whorton and his Tugboat Institute—an organization celebrating quietly exceptional private businesses—was bumped from the cover. The new star? Elizabeth Holmes. Today, Holmes is in prison for fraud. Whorton and the companies he champions are still here, still growing, still mostly unknown to the American public. This book review explores that contrast—and the quietly radical message at the heart of Whorton's Another Way.
That tension—between what's flashy and what endures—sits at the heart of Another Way: Building Companies That Last... and Last... and Last, co-authored by Whorton and journalist Bo Burlingham. The book sets out to illuminate 'evergreen companies': businesses that shun the venture capital treadmill, grow deliberately, and prioritize values like people, purpose, and long-term resilience. It's a message that deserves a wide audience, particularly at a moment when the excesses of Silicon Valley have begun to fray the American imagination.
But like many business books, Another Way struggles under the weight of its own ambitions. It wants to be a manifesto, a guidebook, and a personal journey all at once. At times, it succeeds. At others, particularly early on, it misfires—overshadowing its most compelling ideas with a tone and structure that feel at odds with the humility it praises.
The book unfolds in three parts. The first, 'Get Big Fast,' reads like a memoir. We follow Whorton's rise through the power corridors of Bain, Stanford Business School, Kleiner Perkins, and TPG. He recounts how his faith in the 'go big or go home' gospel eroded through stress, burnout, and disillusionment. But even as he critiques the culture of venture capital, Whorton can't quite resist its narrative flair. 'To this day, I don't know exactly how I came to be invited into the inner sanctum of Silicon Valley venture capital,' he writes, casting himself as a reluctant insider. The tone—equal parts awestruck and self-justifying—can wear thin, especially when interspersed with name-drops and personal triumphs that lack deeper introspection.
Whorton invokes Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey as a guiding framework, but in doing so places himself at the center of a story ostensibly meant to elevate others. The result is a narrative imbalance: we're told this is a book about a better kind of company, but for many pages, the companies themselves remain off-stage.
When they do arrive—in the book's second section, 'The Learning Journey'—the tone shifts and the insights sharpen. Here we meet entrepreneurs like Sridhar Vembu, founder of software company Zoho, who hires teen programmers from Indian villages and trains them in-house. 'There wasn't a VC in the world who would've tolerated the risk,' Whorton notes, 'but he was building software cost-effectively while uplifting entire communities.' It's a perfect emblem of what makes evergreen companies different—not just in strategy, but in philosophy.
Another case study features SAS, the AI and analytics software juggernaut that owns its own sprawling real estate and insists on keeping a campus filled with rose bushes. 'In an industry where the average annual employee turnover rate is 22 percent, SAS's turnover is 3.3 percent,' Whorton writes. That statistic alone is a rebuke to the 'lean and mean' ethos so common in tech.
And then there's Jack Stack of SRC Holdings, who stunned Whorton by building a growing company entirely through internal financing. 'In my entire experience at Stanford Business School, Kleiner Perkins, and TPG,' Whorton admits, 'nobody had ever mentioned anything like what Stack was telling me. I was dumbfounded.' These stories—and there are many more—deliver what the book's premise promises: a revelation that capitalism, done differently, can still work.
The third and final section, 'The Evergreen Advantage,' is the most practical. It outlines the Tugboat framework: the '7 Ps' (Purpose, Perseverance, People First, and so on) and '9 Rules of Innovation' that guide these businesses. This portion reads like a playbook, less polished but more grounded. We learn, for instance, how Radio Flyer continues to innovate without relying on product-pickers, and how H&V—a company that traces its roots in 1728 and has served both Ben Franklin and Elon Musk—has avoided outside capital for more than a century. These examples are less flashy than IPO stories, but no less instructive.
Still, the book's structure may test readers' patience—particularly those looking for these stories up front. Beginning with Whorton's personal journey provides context, but risks obscuring the book's deeper purpose. Fortunately, those who persist will find a more focused and compelling narrative as the chapters progress.
That brings us back to Inc. magazine anecdote in the book's preface—one of its best, and sadly, one of the few with narrative weight. In a single moment, it encapsulates our collective bias toward spectacle, and the cost of ignoring quiet durability. Holmes fizzled. Whorton's companies endured. That's not just a footnote; it's the real story.
In the end, Another Way is not quite the definitive blueprint for evergreen business it wants to be. But as this book review has shown, it offers a meaningful introduction to a world of companies and values that too often go unnoticed. And in that, it succeeds. These businesses may not dominate headlines—but they might just hold the answers to building a more sane and sustainable economy.