Teachers, Teams & Tugboats is a reflective career memoir about leadership, mentorship, and the complicated machinery of global logistics, told through Rich Higgins’s more than forty years in the field. Using tugboats as his central metaphor, Higgins looks back at the people who steadied him, pushed him, protected him, and taught him how to lead. The book moves from noisy trucking docks and deregulation to retail bankruptcies, mergers, Asian port visits, union conflicts, public speaking, health struggles, and late-career reinvention. What holds it together isn’t just supply chain expertise, though there’s plenty of that. It’s gratitude. Again and again, Higgins returns to the idea that a career is rarely built alone, and that the best leaders are the ones powerful enough to guide without needing the spotlight.

I appreciated the book’s emotional honesty. Higgins doesn’t polish himself into some flawless executive hero, and that gives the memoir its warmth. The scene where Tom drives him to work every day after his DUI is one of the book’s most affecting moments because it’s both painful and generous. Higgins lets us feel the shame of that mistake, but he also lets us feel the astonishing grace of a friend who simply shows up. I found that more memorable than many of the larger corporate victories because it captures the book’s real subject: character under pressure. The same is true when he writes about relocating his family and watching his daughters struggle, or turning down the dream job in St. Louis so he could be near his dying father. Those passages carry a quiet ache. They remind us that every career decision has a private cost, and Higgins is at his best when he lets that human truth sit beside the business lesson.

The writing is plainspoken and sincere. Higgins writes like a man talking across a table, and that directness suits the material. The book uses a lot of quotations, acronyms, and operational detail, especially when it gets deep into detention, demurrage, ocean rates, UPS contracts, and best-practice checklists. I did occasionally want a little less instruction and a little more scene. But even the technical passages have an authentic authority. When Higgins describes eliminating rail detention by teaching the distribution center team how the clock worked, creating a Container Priority Report, and getting everyone aligned around FIFO, the lesson lands because it’s concrete. The ideas are strongest when they’re embodied in action: Charlie trying to turn C players into B players, Dave bringing in positive reinforcement training, Greg keeping a position open until Higgins found his way back, Jimmy valuing expertise over age. The book’s moral universe is clear, maybe even stubbornly so, but I liked that about it. Tugboats, captains, crew members, pirates. It’s simple language for complicated workplaces, and it sticks.

Teachers, Teams & Tugboats feels less like a conventional business book and more like a thank-you letter written after a long and meaningful voyage. Its best moments are tender, funny, and grounded in hard-earned perspective, especially when Higgins admits what he didn’t know, who helped him survive, and which values still matter after the titles and relocations fade. I closed the book feeling that its deepest argument isn’t about logistics at all, but about remembering who carried us when we couldn’t quite steer ourselves. I’d recommend it to readers in supply chain, retail, transportation, or operations, but also to managers, mentors, and late-career professionals who want a candid reminder that leadership is built through patience, integrity, gratitude, and the grace to help someone else reach safe harbor.

Pages: 78 | ISBN : 978-1970751505