In 1994 United Airlines became the largest employee majority-owned enterprise in the United States, with various groups of employees – most represented by unions – having purchased 55% of its stock in exchange for various concessions. The employees accepted pay cuts and made other concessions, but were also granted representation on the company’s board of directors…[newline]
Cooperatives are not, as everyone at this conference knows, just a peripheral or incidental or anachronistic or culturally limited form of organization. Rather, they are big business of a distinctly modern type.
The U.S. airline industry has, in recent years, offered some conspicuous examples of a phenomenon that has now become familiar, both in the U.S. and abroad, among firms that face economic difficulties: the granting to employees of a substantial ownership stake in return for wage and work rule concessions necessary to maintain the firm’s viability.
Cisco Systems, specializing in network systems that link computers and provide Internet communications, was founded in 1990. Employee compensation is closely tied to company and individual performance through stock ownership and profit-sharing, and performance is focused on customer satisfaction. Cisco has grown mainly by acquisition, always trying to stay ahead of the next best technological … Read More
Southwest Airlines has created a culture where employees are treated as the company’s number one asset.
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.
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…
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.
How do you share the wealth with your employees without going public? SAIC created an internal stock market that outperforms Wall Street.
Procter & Gamble’s top executives form a small, autonomous, cross-functional Corporate New Ventures team led by a young former brand manager. The team invents a systematic approach to gathering information and producing creative ideas for radically new product categories.
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 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).
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.
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 is a conglomerate that is considering undertaking a leveraged recapitalization.
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.
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.
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.
In the largest attempted employee-buyout in history, a large U.S. commercial airline seeks substantial wage concessions from its employees in return for 53% stake in the airline’s common stock and guaranteed seats on the board of directors.
This book that has, since 1992, become the primer for open-book management, a new method based on the concept of democracy, the spirit of sports, and the reality of numbers.
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, 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.
In the late 1980s Howard Schultz led the Starbucks Coffee Co. to explosive growth, transforming a small whole-bean coffee company into a national retail power. Starbucks success hinged on its reputation for quality and personal service…
This case describes the innovative approach to organizing and managing employees by People Express and describes the company’s eventual demise.
This paper investigates whether employee participation in ownership or profit-sharing in publicly held firms through an ESOP or profit-sharing plan was positively associated with productivity measures. The sample consists of firms that adopted such plans during 1982 through 1987.