Our Story

The Saltwater Institute was born in 1999 in Boulder, Colorado, when a group of CEOs and entrepreneurs sought ways to integrate their personal values with their workplace decisions. One of this circle, Tom Chappell, Co-founder and CEO of Tom’s of Maine and a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School, crafted a set of tools called The Seven Intentions® of Values-Centered Leadership. Tom and the Boulder group created Saltwater as a non-profit, educational foundation to help individuals be more intentional about building values-centered leaders and organizations. Since Saltwater’s founding, over 600 individuals have been graduated with a new understanding of how to lead with their values. The results are transformational, both for individual leadership capacity and for organizational performance.

The Seven Intentions® of Values-Centered Leadership is the core program, assisting individuals who are committed to clarifying and implementing their values in their home, workplace, and community. Other Saltwater programs, based on the values-centered principles of The Seven Intentions® include training in strategic planning, mission development, values orientation, performance evaluation and creativity.

The tools for values-centering in The Seven Intentions® create a new style of management that draws upon the energy and creativity of people by actively addressing the issue of alignment of personal and professional values and decision making in the organization. The Saltwater Institute also works with executive and leadership teams using these same tools to strengthen all aspects of business life. Leaders discover that it is both possible and productive to integrate their personal values with the core beliefs and mission of the organization. They learn how to integrate social and environmental aims with financial and marketplace accountabilities.

OUR GOAL

To help you build a stronger business by identifying your values and those of your company and crafting a plan to weave these values into your business strategy.

OUR STRATEGY

To use the successful model established and operating at Tom's of Maine and articulated in Tom Chappell's book, Managing Upside Down, to help companies in a variety of sectors create success in their own terms using their values.