Uneven. The company profiles are interesting, if sometimes sparse on details, and present views into a more democratic form of corporation.
They’re constantly broken up by vague premonitions of disaster, though, a new kind of Malthusian faith that we’re stretching the Earth to its limits.
No evidence is marshaled in support of this belief, and the effect is to weaken the author’s otherwise well-made argument: that the current way of organizing corporations is not the only way, and some of the alternatives are better.
Despite the hand-wavy references to mysticism and quantum physics, I learned:
- The John Lewis Partnership in the UK is its largest department store chain, and is entirely employee-owned, with an elected employees' council that governs the company alongside the Board of Directors
- The Bank of North Dakota is state-owned (!), the only one in the US
- Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economics for her work proving that the "tragedy of the commons" is not inevitable, and can be avoided while preserving the commons as community property.
