The Executives Institute exists for one reason:
To preserve and pass down the fundamental principles that build enduring businesses.
Trends come and go.
Technology evolves.
But the core disciplines of leadership, ownership, decision-making, and execution rarely change.
The Institute is built to gather those principles in one place — and to allow experienced business operators to add the hard-earned insights that only come from real business battles.
This is not one business guru’s theory.
This is a living archive of practical wisdom from best-selling Authors and their books; from successful business leaders and their organizations.
💡Why The Institute Exists
Most business leaders eventually discover two things:
First, the same lessons appear again and again across decades of business literature.
Second, many of the most valuable lessons are learned the hard way — through mistakes, blind spots, and turning points.
The Executives Institute was created to shorten the learning curve.
The platform organizes timeless business principles — the Rules — each grounded in a classic business book and strengthened by the insights of leaders who have lived through the same challenges.
The goal is simple:
To create a place where business leaders can return, week after week, to sharpen their thinking, challenge their assumptions, and continue learning long after formal education ends.
📚 A Living Library of Business Leadership
At the center of the Institute are 100 foundational business Rules drawn from decades of leadership experience, classic business literature, and conversations with founders, CEOs, operators, and executives across the United States.
Each Rule includes:
• The core principle
• A recommended business book that shaped it
• Questions designed to spark discussion and reflection
• Action steps for leaders and teams
• Insights contributed by executives who have faced the same challenge
Over time, the goal is to build one of the most practical archives of business insight available anywhere.
🌱 Free. Completely. By Design.
Every resource inside The Executives Institute — America’s Business Library; the 100-week self-study program, The Weekly Edge, the 24-month group study program, 10k Leaders; The Boardrooms are 100% free to use. No subscription. No email registration. No tiered access. No premium version waiting behind a paywall. This is a deliberate and permanent choice, not a temporary promotion.
The Institute is being built to be a lasting public resource for business leaders. Restricting access to knowledge would contradict that mission at its foundation. We are building a national archive of practical business knowledge; a repository of the best thinking in business history.
If you find value here and want to help sustain the work, a voluntary support page exists for that purpose. But financial support is never required — and it never unlocks anything that isn’t already available to everyone.
The knowledge belongs to whoever is willing to use it.
🔍 Organizational Structure and Transparency
The Executives Institute operates as an educational initiative of The 100, Inc., a North Dakota nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving and teaching foundational business principles.
The name The Executives Institute and its associated marks are owned by Grindstone Ventures, LLC and are licensed for use by the nonprofit in support of its educational mission. This arrangement ensures the long-term stewardship of the Institute’s identity while allowing the nonprofit organization to focus entirely on its educational work.
The nonprofit operates independently and is supported through voluntary contributions from individuals and organizations who believe in preserving timeless business knowledge for future generations.
🛠️ Built by Practitioners
The Institute was not created by academics or consultants.
It was built by operators — people who have started companies, run organizations, made mistakes, and learned from them.
Over the past three decades, thousands of conversations with founders, executives, and business owners helped shape the Rules that form the foundation of the Institute.
Those conversations revealed something simple but powerful:
The best business education often comes from leaders sharing the lessons they wish they had learned sooner.
The Institute exists to capture and pass those lessons forward.
🧭 A Long-Term Project
The Executives Institute is designed to grow slowly and deliberately.
The goal is not scale for its own sake.
The goal is to build a durable institution — one that future leaders can rely on as a trusted source of timeless business principles and real-world insight.
If you are building something that lasts, you will eventually encounter every Rule here.
And when you do, the Institute will be here — waiting to remind you.
Welcome to The Executives Institute
A place for leaders who believe:
Great businesses are built, not on trends.
They are built on timeless fundamentals practiced with discipline.
Why a Nonprofit?
The mission of The Executives Institute is long-term.
The goal is not to build a company that can be sold or monetized.
The goal is to build a lasting educational resource for business leaders.
Organizing the Institute under a nonprofit structure allows the platform to operate with that long-term purpose in mind.
Instead of distributing profits to owners or investors, resources can be reinvested into expanding the library of Rules, improving the platform, and supporting the continued collection of insights from experienced business leaders.
This structure also allows leaders, companies, and supporters who believe in the mission to make voluntary contributions toward the Institute’s development — not to gain access, but simply to help preserve this resource for future generations of business leaders.
In short, the nonprofit structure aligns the Institute with its core purpose:
To preserve and pass down the fundamental principles that build enduring businesses.
Why “The 100, Inc.”?
The name The 100, Inc. originally came from a simple idea.
In 2015, when the Executives Club of Fargo-Moorhead was formed, membership was intentionally limited to one hundred business leaders each year. The purpose of the limit was not exclusivity for its own sake. It was to ensure that every member in the room was actively building, leading, and contributing to the business community.
The Executives’ Club Fargo-Moorhead continues today, under new leadership.
Over time, the number began to represent something more.
It came to symbolize a small group of leaders willing to take responsibility — not only for their own companies, but for strengthening the broader business community around them.
As the mission expanded beyond a local organization and into the development of The Executives Institute, the name remained.
Today, The 100, Inc. represents the idea that meaningful progress is rarely driven by massive crowds. It is usually driven by a relatively small number of people who are willing to step forward, contribute their insights, and help build something that lasts. The Institute exists to support those leaders and to preserve the lessons they have learned along the way.
Throughout history, progress has rarely depended on the majority. It has depended on a small number of people willing to lead.
🧍♂️ Who’s behind The Institute?
The Executives Institute is the culmination of my 58 years alive and my four decades of life in business. Having been the owner of multiple small businesses (both successful and failed); and employee within nearly every major U.S. industry (a truly unique list of nearly 50 jobs); President’s Club award winner with the National Federation of Independent Business; and founder of The Executives Club Fargo-Moorhead; I’ve seen American business from many, many different vantage points. My career has included 100s of meetings, strategy sessions and difficult conversations with business owners, entrepreneurs, decision-makers, and visionairies (both grounded and crazy). The Institute is the direct and ongoing result of those experiences. It would not exist, however, without the unending support, continual assistance and quiet resilience of the spouse of a serial entrepreneur — my wife, Elle. Together, we are the sole owners of Grindstone Ventures, LLC and operators of The 100, Inc.
thank you for being here. Kurt
Why “Grindstone Ventures, LLC”?
This comes from one of my favorite quotes:
Life is a grindstone. Whether it grinds us down or polishes us up depends on what we’re made of. -Thomas Holcroft
Note from the founder:
— If there were only two Rules…
they would be (in my humble opinion): “Solve a real problem” and “Play the long game”.
In thirty plus years of watching businesses succeed and fail, the pattern is always the same.
The businesses that win are not always the ones with the best product, the best team, or the most capital. They are the ones that solved a real problem — and kept solving it, better, for longer than anyone else was willing to.
These two ideas, taken together, form the backbone of durable business building. Solving a real problem grounds the work in reality — in the genuine needs of real people who will pay for genuine value. Playing the long game provides the orientation that keeps a business from sacrificing its future for its present.
The failure of most businesses can be traced to one of two causes: they built something nobody needed, or they made decisions that optimized for the short term at the cost of what would have been possible if they’d stayed patient.
Both failures are understandable. The pressure to build what’s exciting is real. The pressure to perform in the short term is real. The discipline required to resist both when they point in the wrong direction is what separates the builders who last from the ones who have a good run and then fade.
These principles anchor The Executives Institute’s philosophy: Timeless Business Principles. Collective Modern Insight.
The fundamentals have always been the fundamentals. They will be when today’s trends are forgotten.