The Open-Book Experience: Lessons From Over 100 Companies Who Successfully Transformed Themselves
Over the last decade companies have struggled to balance the human dimension of business with the need to be aggressive, competitive, and profitable.
Nuts! Southwest Airlines’ Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success
Southwest Airlines has created a culture where employees are treated as the company’s number one asset.
Carris Corporation: Incentive Plan Program
For several years, William H. (Bill) Carris (President and CEO) looked for ways to bring employees into the business. From the beginning Michael (Mike) Curran (Vice-President and COO) had been not in favor of implementing short-term incentives at that time. But having worked with Bill for 20 years, Mike knew when Bill’s mind was set on proceeding…
The Perception and Effects of Share Ownership: Empirical Evidence from Employee Buy Outs
This paper explores the impact of employee ownership on employee attitudes, using additional data obtained from four UK bus companies which had adopted the ESOP form of employee share ownership. After reviewing the recent UK literature, the paper highlights findings from US literature that a ‘sense of ownership’ is an important intervening variable between actual ownership and additudinal change, and that opportunities for participation in decision-making are more important that ownership per se in generating feelings of ownership.
Sealed Air Corp.’s Leveraged Recapitalization (A, B)
Less than a year after Sealed Air embarked on a program to improve manufacturing efficiency and product quality, the company borrowed almost 90% of the market value of its common stock and paid it out as a special dividend to shareholders.
Own It, Grow It, Trade It
How do you share the wealth with your employees without going public? SAIC created an internal stock market that outperforms Wall Street.
Cooperation Works!: How People Are Using Cooperative Action to Rebuild Commuities and Revitalize the Economy
Fifty case studies of new types of cooperatives, from healthcare, camping gear, trailer courts, buffalo, hardware, housing, sports teams, credit, carpet, even manure and beyond highlight the almost limitless ways people are using cooperative action to rebuild community, revitalize their economies and secure their lives.
Employee Ownership as Catalyst of Organizational Change
This article identifies several key factors as mediating links between employee ownership plans and organizational effectiveness: the initiator’s purpose of the employee ownership plan; perceptions of ownership; level of participative decision-making systems; and organizational culture.
The Privatization of Rhone-Poulenc–1993
In mid-1993, representatives of Rhone-Poulenc, a leading nationalized French firm, worked with the French government to plan the imminent privatization of the firm.
Transportation Displays, Incorporated (D): Exiting from a Successful Restructuring
Following a successful corporate turnaround and, more recently, a leveraged recapitalization, management of a highly profitable, fast–growing outdoor advertising company must consider alternative ways to harvest cash flow from the company without jeopardizing the turnaround or incurring significant tax liabilities.
Employee Ownership, Employee Attitudes, and Firm Performance: A Review of the Evidence
Employee ownership in U.S. companies has grown substantially in the past 20 years. This paper reviews and provides some meta-analyses on the accumulated evidence concerning the prevalence, causes, and effects of employee ownership, covering 25 studies of employee attitudes and behaviors, and 27 studies of productivity and profitability (with both cross-sectional and pre/post comparisons).
My Struggle with Wall Street
Many of the most important practices at this company exist in large part because Wall Street and the banks have applied so much pressure. If the financial community had gone easier on us, we might not be where we are today.
The Ad Agency to End All Ad Agencies
St. Lukes, a rebellious young agency spun out of the once-revolutionary Chiat/Day, practices what it preaches — the gospel of total ethics and common ownership.
McKay Nursery Company (A, B)
McKay Nursery Co., founded in 1897 in Waterloo, WI, had a longstanding history of commitment to employees. The close-knit organization was a pioneer in the agricultural industry of several employee-friendly policies. But in the early 1980s, as McKay’s owners grew older and senior management neared retirement, the next generation of managers feared for the future of the profitable, debt-free company…
Colt Industries
Colt Industries is a conglomerate that is considering undertaking a leveraged recapitalization.
Open-Book Management: The Coming Business Revolution
Open-book management is not so much a technique as a way of thinking, a process that actively involves employees in the financial life of the company.
Why Do Firms Adopt Profit Sharing and Employee Ownership Plans?
Profit-sharing and employee ownership in companies have attracted considerable interest, yet there has been little research on factors predicting the adoption and maintenance of these plans. This study uses new data from a survey of 500 US public companies, and panel data on corporate financial variables, to examine factors predicting the presence and adoption of profit-sharing and employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) in the 1975–91 period.
Transportation Displays, Incorporated (C): The Case for a Preemptive Restructuring
A company nears the end of a long multiyear turnaround and now must consider how to “cash out” so its management can realize a financial return on investment. The privately held company has several options, including a leveraged ESOP and a leveraged recapitalization.
Connor Formed Metal Products
Connor Formed Metal Products was a small, privately owned manufacturer of custom metal springs and stampings. Since becoming president in 1984, Bob Sloss had implemented many changes to the company’s organizational structure, management control systems, and information systems.
Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs): Objectives, Design Options and International Experience
Employee share schemes are becoming more prevalent worldwide. Originally designed as an ownership-broadening technique of finance, the term ‘ESOP’ is now used to describe a wide variety of employee participation strategies covering a diverse array of applications. ESOPs are best known for their adaptability and flexibility across a broad range of economic, political, and cultural circumstances.
Participation and Productivity: a Comparison of Worker Cooperatives and Conventional Firms in the Plywood Industry
A perennial issue is the study of organizational behavior is the impact on productivity of participation by workers in a firm’s decisionmaking. The question has returned to the foreground is the recent debate over policies to increase U.S. productivity growth.
Work Alienation and Problem Alcohol Behavior
Using a sample of production workers from union, nonunion, producer cooperative, and employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) wood products mills in the Northwest, we test the general proposition that work alienation, defined as low job autonomy, low use of capacities, and lack of participation in decision-making in the workplace, is associated with heavy drinking and negative consequences from drinking.
Employee participation, ownership, and productivity: A theoretical framework
A new conceptual framework to define and differentiate among diverse forms of employee ownership is developed.
Transportation Displays, Incorporated (A)
William Apfelbaum, president and CEO of Transportation Displays, Inc., must restructure both the company’s method of doing business and its liabilities to keep it from bankruptcy. The value he hopes to receive from the reorganized company will be an important issue in the restructuring negotiations with creditors.
Transportation Displays, Incorporated (B)
Transportation Displays, Inc. has gone through a series of restructurings. This case describes the last few stages, which substantially reduced debt and increased the ownership of management.