by Natasha Lair
Last updated: 1:40 PM ET, Thu October 15, 2026
After 36 years building G Adventures from a start-up funded by two maxed-out credit cards into one of the world's largest small-group adventure travel companies, founder Bruce Poon Tip is asking a question that might surprise some: What happens when the person who built a business realizes it needs to succeed without them?
It's a question at the centre of his new book, Communityship: Lessons from the Universe and the Business of Everyone, which will be published by HarperCollins in Canada and the United States on November 24, 2026.
The book, which features a foreword by the late Dr. Jane Goodall, is part memoir and part examination of traditional leadership, drawing on Poon Tip's experiences building G Adventures and the lessons he's learned along the way.
For Poon Tip, an Officer of the Order of Canada and New York Times bestselling author, the goal is no longer simply to grow the company he founded at 22. It's to ensure G Adventures can thrive for another 100 years, long after he's gone.
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“Communityship is about understanding that none of us succeeds alone,” says Bruce Poon Tip.
“For 36 years, I thought my job was to build G Adventures. I eventually realised 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.”
When the Founder Becomes the Obstacle
Throughout much of G Adventures' history, Poon Tip has been the face of the company. But in Communityship, he examines how the founder-driven leadership model that helped establish the business could eventually limit its future.
He writes candidly about the discomfort of relinquishing control, including moments when he questioned whether there was still a place for him in the company he had spent decades building.
His conclusion is that lasting success requires moving away from the idea of an indispensable leader and toward a business where responsibility is shared among employees, partners, travellers and the communities it serves.
The concept of communityship, as he defines it, combines leadership, partnership and friendship, with an emphasis on mutual responsibility and care that extends beyond the organization itself.
Rethinking Profit, Purpose and Success
The book also explores the relationship between profitability and social responsibility, drawing on G Adventures' history of community tourism and its work with Planeterra, the nonprofit organization Poon Tip founded.
He examines initiatives including Trees for Days, as well as the company's decision to develop its own methods for measuring social and environmental impact rather than relying exclusively on established certification systems such as B Corp.
Poon Tip questions conventional definitions of business success and argues that financial performance and positive community impact should not be treated as competing priorities.
He also revisits the company's responses to disasters and crises in destinations where it operates, questioning whether traditional charitable approaches always deliver meaningful, long-term results.
Starting Over When Travel Stopped
One of the book's most significant chapters revisits the COVID-19 pandemic, when G Adventures saw its revenue disappear almost overnight.
After three decades of growth, Poon Tip faced the prospect of dismantling much of what he had built.
Rather than viewing the pandemic solely as a business catastrophe, he describes how it created an opportunity to reconsider the company's operations, priorities and future.
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The experience reinforced his belief that entrepreneurs cannot always anticipate the next crisis, but they can build organizations capable of adapting when circumstances change.
Failure, Intuition and the Universe
Beyond the business lessons, Communityship explores Poon Tip's belief that some of the most important moments in his career were shaped by unexpected circumstances, chance encounters and what he describes as guidance from the universe.
He reflects on mistakes, difficult decisions and failures, as well as the people who influenced his thinking and helped shape G Adventures.
Rather than presenting entrepreneurship as a series of carefully executed plans, the book examines the role of intuition, adaptability and the willingness to recognize opportunities that weren't part of the original strategy.
Ultimately, Poon Tip argues that preparing a company for the future has less to do with predicting what's coming and more to do with building a community capable of navigating uncertainty together.
For the entrepreneur who spent more than three decades building G Adventures, that means accepting that his greatest achievement may not be the company he created, but the one that continues without him.
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