Frieda Takaki took a deep breath, filling her senses. She was about to make a very difficult decision. She took off her shoes, placed them next to her desk and started pacing her office barefoot as she was thinking aloud. “I can’t let this business close down,” she whispered. “I have to do something about it.” The answer was now abundantly clear: why wouldn’t the employees buy the business from the owners?
The ESOP – Employee Stock Ownership Plan – is, slowly, on the rise. These worker-owned businesses are more productive and could benefit the American economy.
Technically, an ESOP is a retirement plan and serves the purpose of accumulating retirement savings for the company’s employees. In practice, however, they can act as a cash buyer of private company stock, thus creating a source of liquidity for the company’s owners.
Maui Divers established its employee ownership plan in 1997. Maui Divers store managers/employee owners embrace the business as their own. Although the final decision belongs to the company management team, store managers excel in increasing sales and they continuously come up with business plans in order to make the business better.
The report is a rigorous study of the available international evidence into how companies with significant employee ownership perform, on a range of key business indicators.
This research looks at how employee-owned businesses performed before and during the 2007-2009 recession. This report assesses the financial performance of employee-owned businesses compared with conventionally structured companies where employees do not have a significant stake in ownership or the right to participate in decision-making.
Netflix was among a small group of Silicon Valley companies to emerge from the technology bubble of the late 1990s a clear winner in terms of growth, market share, and profitability. That Netflix was able not only to prevail over this competition but also to thrive was largely attributable to the culture of freedom and … Read More
The authors found that companies with broad-based stock option plans (here, defined as those where most nonmanagement employees receive option grants) had statistically significant higher productivity levels and annual growth rates than public companies in general and their peers.
Curriculum material for Beyster Institute’s Employee Ownership Management Program, a seminar presented at the Rady School, UCSD.
The Beyster Institute at UC San Diego’s Rady School of Management works to advance the understanding and practice of employee ownership as an effective and responsible business model. We focus on education, research and consulting to promote employee ownership and the creation of effective ownership cultures.
Newsletter of The Beyster Institute, helping to build entrepreneurial companies through employee ownership.
The first ESOP (employee stock ownership plan) came into being in 1956. This article describes the origin and history of the ESOP and explains why ESOPs will increasingly become the business succession tool of choice for many owners of privately held businesses.
The National Center for Employee Ownership (NCEO) is a private, nonprofit membership and research organization that serves as the leading source of information on employee stock ownership plans, equity compensation plans such as stock options, and ownership culture.
Since its inception in 1978, The ESOP Association has represented the interests of all corporations that sponsor employee stock ownership plans, or ESOPs.
The ESOP Association Canada is a non-profit organization founded to promote the concept of employee ownership for business in Canada.
Kevin Cleary, President and COO of Emeryville, California based Clif Bar & Company, explores how this privately held, employee owned company is also socially responsible. Series: ‘UC Davis Graduate School of Management’s Dean’s Distinguished Speaker Series’
The FED was established to promote the concept of broad-based, participative employee ownership and entrepreneurism and actively funds inter-disciplinary research and development of business school and engineering curricula.
Ask Don about what it’s like to run a company where the employees are stockholders, and he can wax warm and fuzzy.
CEO Michael Mendes has transformed a grower-owned cooperative into a publicly traded top marketer of snack foods. Diamond’s organization, culture, product development process, advertising and promotion strategy, and specifically its marketing department have been built ‘from the ground up’ to address fundamental changes in retail structure and consumer behavior. Can the Diamond model be successfully applied to other food categories?
This PowerPoint presentation is a case study that is part of Class 4 from the Course: Topics in Corporate Governance: Techniques of Equity Compensation. The case study discusses ATA Engineering, Inc., a leading independent company in modal and dynamic testing of aerospace structures in the U.S. Their mission statement is to be the leading provider … Read More
This course is designed to give students the capacity to understand and evaluate the various tools and techniques available under current law and practice for applying corporate equity as a compensation and motivation vehicle for employees.
The Beyster Fellowship Symposium brings together academic leaders and new scholars involved with evaluating broad-based employee ownership (EO) and entrepreneurism. The first symposium was held July 2009 in La Jolla, CA. Over 40 academics shared their research findings and participated in an MIT Enterprise Forum panel discussion, which was attended by more than 200 people. The following are videos of Symposium presentations highlighting multiple dimensions of the history, development, and process of employee ownership.
‘Making employee ownership work’ is a new guide from the Employee Ownership Association and co-ownership advisers the Baxi Partnership, based on a survey of 25 EOA member companies including John Lewis, Unipart, Arup and Mott MacDonald.
This paper addresses the issue of how gainsharing programs work by proposing a model of gainsharing as an organizational learning system.
This course provides an understanding of the human and organizational contexts in which the student will be working and the skills to put the scientific, technical and organizational knowledge learned to work in addressing the major challenges facing management and organizations today.