Leading Companies Online Magazine Archives
What Goes Around Comes Around
By Anthony I. Mathews, Beyster Institute Staff
Last week, we were privileged to participate for the second year as guest lecturers in the eighth Experiential Classroom workshop at Syracuse University. It is an amazing experience as about 100 professors of entrepreneurship from all over the country come together to refine their abilities and develop new techniques for teaching entrepreneurship. Topics range from “Is Entrepreneurship Even a Discipline?” to “Case Teaching” demonstrations to (yes, you got it) to “The Role of Employee Ownership in an Entrepreneurship Curriculum.” (I’m sure you can figure out where we fit in.)
IIt was an exciting and energizing four days. We met with many of the leaders in the area of entrepreneurship education and had innumerable engrossing conversations about the potential overlap between curricula in entrepreneurship and our message of the value of employee ownership. We found a good deal of resonance with the idea that entrepreneurship can (and ought to) mean more than just the enrichment of one or a small number of people. We found a good audience for the notion that an enterprise that facilitates a broader distribution of the value of ownership will, in fact, create considerably more wealth than it might have otherwise.
As the experience of SAIC so amply demonstrates, the nature of a truly entrepreneurial company is completely compatible with widely distributed ownership among stakeholders. And, it results in dramatic and positive changes in the lives and futures of literally thousands of people. The potential of Employee Ownership in this context is clearly as the creator of “the much bigger pie," and the idea seems to be gaining some real traction among these educational leaders.
Needless to say, we had a lot of fun, and we will look forward to doing it again next year, at least in part because this is an important inroad to one of our most significant constituencies.
As we have written elsewhere, you may recall, we believe that we serve five critical demographics in spreading the word of employee ownership. The first three fit into a fairly traditional presentation model and we have good (at least well tried) methods to reach them. We know a lot about how to reach:
- Entrepreneurs and business owners who could have an interest in implementing employee ownership for reasons of their own.
- Advisors to entrepreneurs and business owners who should be up to date in their understanding of current forms and applications of employee ownership.
- People involved in one way or another in companies that have already adopted employee ownership.
And, as a consequence, we have a pretty good track record of creating programs that reach those audiences. But the other two constituencies are harder nuts to crack:
- Students of business and entrepreneurship
- Professors of business and entrepreneurship
There is virtually no track record of reaching these two groups by anyone. Research on the effectiveness of employee ownership has been carefully and expertly done, but the messages have been, for the most part, lost within the community of those who already believe in employee ownership and the few legislators who may need to be convinced about a particular piece of legislation.
We’re convinced, though, that, in the long run, bringing the word about employee ownership to the traditional educational arena (students and professors alike) will have the most profound and lasting effect on the spread of the concept throughout our country and the world. Fall of 2007 is shaping up to be a good season for this quest.
Our contacts through the Experiential Classroom have given us a small but very important inroad to some of the best educators in entrepreneurship in the country. We were able to entice several of them to consider working with us to develop entrepreneurship case studies and class modules that highlight employee ownership and can serve as a vehicle to deliver the message to classes all over the U. S.
Equally important, starting October 3rd and continuing through the fall term, we will be offering the first-ever regular MBA class in employee ownership at UCSD. (We were a little disappointed when we found out that there are no erasers to clap any more, as we recall from our last formal classroom teaching experience. Somehow the dry erase board is just not the same, but we’re pretty confident we’ll find some equivalent way to appropriately motivate students.) In any case, we’ll let you know how that goes as it proceeds. We are very excited to begin as this represents an inroad to our fifth, and perhaps most important constituency: future entrepreneurs and leaders of business.
So, it’s been a good summer and we couldn’t be happier going into the new academic year.
Oh, I almost forgot the “what goes around comes around” part…
On the last day of the Experiential Classroom workshop, I overheard a very distinguished professor (with whom I had chatted with briefly the day before) introduce himself to someone else as coming from John Carroll University in Cleveland. The name was familiar to me because about 15 years ago, I was involved in the creation of an ESOP for a company founded and built by an entrepreneur named Ed Muldoon. He was an amazing man and wonderful to work with (he passed away recently) and, as we had Jesuit education in common, he had often mentioned his love for his alma mater “John Carroll University”.
Anyway, I went up to the professor and asked him if, in his travels, he had ever run into Ed Muldoon at an alumni meeting or something. He just chuckled and reached for one of his business cards that listed him as a Chair at the Muldoon Center for Entrepreneurship. It seems that some of the proceeds of Ed’s sale to the ESOP wound up endowing a center for the study of entrepreneurship so that this professor and I could meet up in Syracuse 15 years later and share the message.
II love it when a plan comes together.
©2007 The Beyster Institute and its authors and their entities. All rights reserved.
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