Wawa Inc.
The Wawa associates have an ESOP which plays a key role in Wawa’s culture of ownership. This case explores the role of incentives and levers of control to create a successful retail chain.
Employee Ownership: A Theoretical and Empirical Investigation of Management Entrenchment vs. Reward Management
Employee ownership is often used not only as a reward management tool but also as an entrenchment mechanism. The literature suggests that good managers use employee ownership as a reward management tool, whereas bad managers implement it for entrenchment, thus suggesting the existence of an equilibrium level of employee ownership. The contributions of this paper … Read More
The SAIC Solution: Built by Employee Owners
This book is a guide to implementing principles and practices developed and used by SAIC to drive exponential growth, global expansion, and diversification across science and technology customers and markets…
“We The Owners” Film Garners Awards, Attention and National Distribution
Most people know either first-hand or through someone close to them what it feels like to not be valued, to not have a say, to not have control, or to be demotivated at work. A feel-good movie about three companies – New Belgium Brewery, Namasté Solar, and DPR Construction – that strive for the opposite is a welcome relief.
Sometimes EXIT is Spelled ESOP
In this 20-minute radio interview, Martin Staubus, executive director, Beyster Institute at the Rady School of Management is interviewed by host, Bill Black on ExitCoachRadio.com.
Building Community at Terra Nova Consulting
This case describes the challenges faced by the president of an engineering and environmental services consulting firm (Terra Nova Consulting) as it seeks to address deep internal cultural divisions…
The Nuttall Review of Employee Ownership: One Year On Report
This report provides an update on progress of the 2012 Nuttall Review, including recommendations measured against the commitments made in the U.K. government response to the review. Progress has been made against all 28 of the Nuttall Review Recommendations and in over half of the recommendations progress has been assessed as having been significant. Work … Read More
Zingerman’s Community of Businesses: Broad-Based Ownership, Governance, & Sustainability
Inc. Magazine’s “coolest small company in America,” Zingerman’s Community of Businesses (ZCoB), is an exemplar positive organization known for its culture and award-winning food. This case covers the ZCoB’s decision in 2013 to migrate toward broad-based employee ownership and the iterative, inclusive process by which Zingerman’s Partners Group researched and crafted a new ownership design … Read More
Trust in the Digital Age
Trust in all organizations is a key to cultural cohesiveness and teamwork…
Doing Well and Doing Good: Pioneer Employers Discover Profits and Deliver Opportunity for Frontline Workers
A new study of business practices reveals powerful ways to create strategic and financial gains. Lower-wage workers, when supported by effective policies, boost productivity, quality, innovation, and revenues from new markets…
The Age of Autonomy
Why is Southwest so uniquely able to succeed where others can’t? The thing that makes Southwest employees a powerful force for success is that they are autonomous workers working toward a common goal…
Somewhere Between Complacency and Fear
Cecil Ursprung, the former CEO of Reflexite Corporation, once described his ideal organizational culture as being a permanent ‘state of mild dissatisfaction.’ You may not agree with the word ‘dissatisfaction,’ but I expect you would agree that innovation flourishes when employee owners are constantly seeking ways to improve the company and that happens when employees are not satisfied with the status quo. Creative energy flows when people refuse to walk away from situations that are ‘good enough.”
Sharing Success: The Nuttall Review of Employee Ownership
This review took evidence from a wide range of sources, covering, in particular, employee owned companies, sector representatives, professional advisers and employer and employee groups. The broad categories of obstacles to employee ownership were soon identified, and were continually reinforced as this review proceeded. They fall into the following three categories: a lack of awareness … Read More
Client Profile: Dini Partners, Inc.
Dini Partners, Inc. became an S-Corporation as of Jan. 1, 2012. ‘It was clearly a way to define an ownership transition. The ESOP provided a path to an orderly transition of ownership. Also, as some of our senior members of the staff transition into retirement, we needed a vehicle to incentivize the younger, talented professionals to have a long-term stake in the firm.’
The 2012 Election Cycle: An Embarrassing Circus, Perhaps, but a Great Opportunity for Employee Ownership, for Sure
It is time to make the case that employee ownership is a solution to a lot of what is wrong with our country, and we need to continue to promote the concept until we have 30,000 or 40,000 employee-owned companies rather than the static 10,000 we have had for the last decade or more. If we can do that, we will have put a large part of the country on a much stronger footing, and moved toward solving some fundamental economic and social problems…
We the Owners: Employees Expanding the American Dream Official Trailer
Integrating art, business and education, this documentary film captures inspiring stories of employees and founders from three companies, each structured with distinct forms of broad-based employee ownership, who share an insider’s view of shared wealth and responsibility, high involvement culture, and their approaches and challenges in creating opportunity and prosperity through ownership.
Creating a High-Performing Workplace
Beyster Institute Senior Consultant Martin Staubus is teaching a course entitled ‘Management 269: Creating a High-Performing Workplace.’ In this interview, Professor Staubus describes the course’s five themes.
How to Level the Compensation Playing Field: Employee Ownership
Outrage over pay differentials between company workers and directors is making political waves in Britain. One solution? Employee ownership.
Starting Over in Lexington: Taking Ownership
The folks at our Lexington, Ky. plant are well on their way to becoming owners of their company, all part of our plan to turn the operation around and make it profitable again.
Employee Ownership and Equity Compensation at ATA Engineering
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
Employee Ownership: A Topic for the Entrepreneurship Curriculum
This Teaching module shows four areas in the entrepreneurship curriculum where teaching about employee ownership can 1) put a needed spotlight on this widespread and useful practice and 2) add conceptual value and rich examples for the course topics being taught…
The Beyster Fellowship Symposium Video Series
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.
The Carris Companies: Doing the Next Right Thing
Presented in this case is the Carris Companies’ movement towards 100% employee shared ownership and governance with an emphasis on and investment in education; focus on ‘quality of life’; economic, educational and social accessibility provided by the company for its employees, many of whom are unskilled at the time of initial employment; encouragement of employee wellness; employee involvement in corporate decision-making and philanthropy; companies’ increased efforts to reduce waste and energy use and the overall positive effects on the companies’ profitability…
Creating the Ownership Edge at Your ESOP Company
Our experience and research over the 30 years that employee ownership has shown two distinctive realities: first, overall, employee ownership gives companies a performance advantage—”the ownership edge.” Second, there is no ready-to-use process to guarantee that a company will achieve the ownership edge. There are, however, six clusters of practices that appear again and again in successful ownership companies. This article describes these six components of ownership management and illustrates the myriad ways in which companies implement them.
ESOP Termination: Phase 1
This report describes the results of the first phase of a research project on the reasons companies terminate employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs). It summarizes interviews with company leaders at former ESOP companies and suggests directions for the quantitative research planned for phase 2 of this project.