Growth rarely comes without growing pains, especially in the Darwinian world of retail. One of the major challenges for any successful business is managing growth by planning and executing effective strategies.
It is estimated that more than 20 million employees currently hold stock in their companies through a variety of benefit options, including employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs), broadly granted stock options, or 401(k) plans with heavy concentrations of employer stock.
Today, more than 25 percent of American workers own stock in their employers. Now Corey Rosen, John Case, and Martin Staubus present convincing evidence that employee ownership can be much more than just a good benefit program.
On September 30, the seven employees of Select Machine, in Brimfield, Ohio, began to purchase their company from the two retiring owners, Doug Beavers and Bill Sagaser, using an employee-owned cooperative.
This note contains examples of mission and vision statements from a number of employee-owned companies, including Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Whole Foods, King Arthur Flour, and more.
An increasing number of engineering firms are adopting ESOPs because of their many benefits. “We’re seeing a resurgence in them,” says Matheson, managing director of Matheson Financial Advisors in Falls Church, Va. “There’s a growing trend.”
This paper analyses data on 490 companies with broad-based stock option plans, matched to data from Compustat in order to compare their characteristics and performance to that of other public companies.
We examine labor productivity in small, medium, and large firms that broadly distribute stock options under starkly different market conditions – during the bull (1995-1997) and bear (2000-2002) stock markets. We find greater labor output in both upward and downward markets in all firm size categories, with the exception of small firms in a declining market, where the productivity is also greater, but the statistical significance of the result is weak.
The survival rate of worker cooperatives and employee-owned firms in market economics appears to equal or surpass that of conventional firms. But they typically return a different combination of economic benefits to their member-owners than do conventional firms…
This paper examines the productivity effect of the adoption of executive and broad-based stock options. The findings include a positive impact on productivity after the introduction of both executive and broad-based stock options.
Over 25 years, The Davey Tree Expert Company’s employee owners built a good small company into one of the premier companies in its industry, with an entrepreneurial zest for new products and acquisitions. The company’s development would have pleased its inventive founder and provably surprised the family members who sold it to hesitant employees in 1979.
Is it true that small businesses are just big businesses that haven’t succeeded yet? John Abrams’ company pursues conscious growth not maximum growth.
Democratic Capitalism combines the free-market energies of competition and private property with the enormous productivity and innovation released in an environment of trust and cooperation. Ray Carey presents the theory and practice of democratic capitalism by coupling his experience with a synthesis of the thought of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Stuart Mill.
Can a support organization enhance the development and performance of an employee-owned sector in a market economy? That is the question this paper will address.
Research on employee ownership has focused on questions of productivity, profitability, and employee attitudes and behavior, while there has been little attention to the most basic measure of performance: survival of the company. This study uses data on all U.S. public companies as of 1988, following them through 2001 to examine how employee ownership is related to survival.
The case examines how Springfield Remanufacturing Corporation Holdings (SRC), a key player in the engine and parts remanufacturing market in the US, turned itself around by implementing the ‘Open Book Management’ (OBM) philosophy.
By law, shareholders have an exclusive right to make certain corporate decisions, and this arrangement is generally justified by the shareholder’s role as the owner of the firm. However, many thoughtful observers hold that such a privileged position for shareholders is morally objectionable, in part because it neglects the important role played by employees.
Nonprofit corporations, cooperatives, and credit unions constitute an alternative avenue of hope and action for communities that have come up short in the normal operation of the market economy. These organizations comprise the third sector, which accounts for approximately 10 percent of U.S. economic activity.
The Baby Boom is de-booming and soon there will be many more jobs than people available to fill them. The message: Keep your workers happy today.
UAL suffered from particular design flaws in its stock ownership plan and, more seriously, the absence of complementary institutions focused on the distinctive problems of employee-owned firms.
There is a significant gap in the incidence and development of employee ownership between the European Union (EU) and the US when both sectors are examined.
Details a thinly disguised situation faced by a recent Harvard MBA graduate who was forced by a prospective employer to place a dollar value on a grant of stock options.
This paper presents finding from our most recent research on the transformation of participatory employment practices of Japanese firms in the 1990s, during which the Japanese economy slowed down considerably. The operation appears to be of particular public policy interest for many countries considering participatory employment practices as a way to improve their productivity performance and thus competitiveness.
Mike Katz, an MBA with several years of manufacturing management experience, talks about purchasing Molded Dimensions, Inc. (MDI), a Wisconsin-based plastics manufacturer, with his wife Linda, who also has a manufacturing background.
The fifty employee owners of Jet Rubber Company, a manufacturer of custom molded goods and rubber-to-metal parts founded in 1955, celebrated the 10th anniversary of their ESOP in March 2003.