*Beyond the Corporation is a book for our times.
*Offering inspiration and vision in the wake of financial Armageddon, it is the story of ordinary people who share the ownership of the businesses where they work. * The enterprises come in all sizes: from companies employing just a few dozen people, to large corporations:
*John Lewis in the UK, employing 70,000 ’partners’;
*Mondragon, a highly entrepreneurial group of over 100 businesses in Spain employing more than 100,000; and many examples in the US, each employing tens of thousands.
*It would be hard to imagine a better informed, more involved or more enthusiastic set of employees - sharing the efforts of making their companies successful, and sharing all of the rewards.
*Unusually in the corporate world, they control their own destinies - a situation beyond the dreams of most working people.
*Erdal takes a hard look at those who insist, in the teeth of the evidence, that shared ownership will never work - a sorry tale of prejudice masquerading as economic thinking.
*The book contains detailed case studies as well as interviews with a range of people, whose inspiring stories of success fly in the face of economists’ standard predictions.
*These successes include high levels of productivity; sustained rapid growth; fast-moving, innovative responses to changing worlds; high levels of investment aimed at long-term prosperity; and above all, the sheer happiness that comes from the experience of working together in businesses that they own together, sharing the
**At a time when the ’normal’ corporate economy has been badly shaken, Beyond the Corporation is a book to weigh in the balance.