Bruce Poon Tip explores the future of leadership in new book

In his new book, Communityship: Lessons from the Universe and the Business of Everyone, Bruce Poon Tip, the founder of G Adventures, explores why the future of business belongs not to heroic leaders, but to the communities around them.

For Poon Tip, the answer is communityship — a radically different approach to leadership built on trust, shared responsibility, belonging and a collective sense of purpose.

After 36 years building G Adventures from a start-up founded on two maxed-out credit cards, into the world’s largest small-group adventure travel company, the entrepreneur, philanthropist, New York Times bestselling author and Officer of the Order of Canada is asking a bigger question: how do you build a company that can thrive for the next 100 years, long after its founder is gone?

Communityship: Lessons from the Universe and the Business of Everyone, will be published by HarperCollins in Canada and the USA on November 24, 2026, with a foreword by the late Dr. Jane Goodall.

Poon Tip writes: “If leadership is enabling others to accomplish something they could do on their own, and partnership is two or more people sharing responsibility, and friendship is about accepting, caring for, and supporting each other, then communityship is enabling each other to accomplish goals through shared responsibility and mutual care, with an eye always on the good not only of your own community but every community you come into contact with.”

Part memoir, part business book, Communityship traces Bruce’s unconventional journey from 22-year-old entrepreneur to founder of one of travel’s most innovative start-up success stories.

Along the way, he explores the highs, failures, uncomfortable lessons, unexpected moments of what he describes as being “guided” by the universe and the people who helped shape G Adventures along the way.

He explores the difficult transition from being the person with all the answers to becoming one part of a much bigger ecosystem and writes candidly about moments when he felt there was “no seat on the bus” for him in the future of the company he had spent decades building, and the discomfort of discovering that letting go could be harder than starting something from scratch.

Yet rather than seeing this as the end of his leadership journey, Poon Tip came to see it as a new beginning: finding peace in the idea that his legacy did not need to be his continued control.

At the heart of the book is Poon Tip’s belief that the age of heroic leadership needs to give way to something more sustainable. Rather than building organizations around a single charismatic or indispensable leader, communityship distributes responsibility across the people, partners, travellers and communities that make a business possible.

Said Poon Tip: “Communityship is about understanding that none of us succeeds alone. For 36 years, I thought my job was to build G Adventures. I eventually realized my job was to build something that could outlive me. That meant letting go of control, trusting other people and creating a community that felt responsible for the future of the business. The next 100 years of G Adventures cannot belong to one person. They have to belong to all of us.”