Hello John,
My colleagues and I have been working on this book, Shared Entrepreneurship: A Path to Engaged Employee Ownership, for over six years. It was published on August 14th. The Aspen Institute is featuring it on its web site, http://caseplace.org/d.asp?d=7392. All the royalties from the sale of this book are going to be used to support additional research on shared entrepreneurship.
A little history about how this book came to be and why. Initially, my colleagues and I did not set out to write a book; we set out to write some case studies. We did not aim to write about employee-owned companies. However, that is exactly what we did, and we learned there was much more to them than just employee ownership.
Charles Manz and I have been writing about W. L. Gore & Associates for over 20 years. Through Karen Manz, we obtained access to Herman Miller to conduct interviews and write articles. Both of these companies, coincidentally, have some degree of employee ownership. Then with other colleagues, we began to study other companies that were employee-owned. From our interactions with Joseph Blasi, Doug Kruse, and others, we learned that companies that had similar practices to the ones that we were studying outperformed other companies on both financial (e.g., return on assets and revenue growth), and humanistic (e.g., lower turnover and fewer layoffs) criteria. As we progressed and talked to each other, we learned that these companies had certain things in common. We surveyed the textbooks used commonly to teach management and found that what we observed going on in these companies was not covered in most texts. Thus, we decided that a book to fill the void was worthwhile and we should do it.
This book is an example of shared entrepreneurship. It is a collaborative effort. As stated previously, we worked on it for over six years. It would not have been possible for any one of us to do it alone.
The case studies were executed in various teams of researchers who went on site to a company for observation and interviews, and then followed up with further data collection and clarification. Therefore, different chapters have different authors. We practiced shared leadership in the writing so that the cases in the book all have different first authors with two exceptions. Most of the decisions about this book were made by consensus. Thus, the authorship of the book is shared.
We are practicing shared ownership also in that the profits (royalties as we stated earlier) will be used by the team that authored this book to continue work on shared entrepreneurship. Our goal is to become a funded research center. Our primary purpose is to develop educational materials for both students and the business community on how to develop companies that practice shared entrepreneurship. If someone would like to help fund such a center, please contact the book's lead author, Frank Shipper.
The book and its cases can be used to teach entrepreneurship, strategic human resource management, high performance work systems, and other management topics. I have been teaching this material for over 20 years. It seems to make a strong impression on students. Some have looked me up 10 or 20 years later and told me the cases that they worked on and even one quoted my definition of an organization back to me -- an illusion of form and substance at a point in time from chaos.
Would you please distribute this e-mail to the AOM's Entrepreneurship listserv?
Frank
Frank Shipper, PH.D.
PROFESSOR OF MANAGEMENT
PERDUE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS
SALISBURY UNIVERSITY
1101 CAMDEN AVE,
SALISBURY, MD 21801-6860
fmshipper@Salisbury.edu
Voice: 410 543-6333
FAX: 410-543-8425
TTY: 410 543-6083
Toll Free: 1-888 543-0148