by Jeffrey Hollender | Aug 3, 2011
“Trained people will build better companies.” -Director of New Member Training at Mondragon Cooperative Corporation- What if the board members of every US corporation were trained in the basics of corporate governance – before they took office? Imagine that kind of...
by Jeffrey Hollender | Aug 1, 2011
“This is a people society, money is only a resource” -Mikel Lezamiz, Director of Cooperative Dissemination at Mondragon- As part of a group of 17 people from the Co-Lab at MIT, we all had lots of questions during the initial orientation. Our guide and primary teacher...
by Jeffrey Hollender | Jul 29, 2011
This is the first of a series of posts I’ll be writing to describe my trip to the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation, located in the Basque region of Spain. I’m compelled to start with purpose, mission and values. Whatever one might conclude about Mondragon, the single...
by Jeffrey Hollender | Jul 27, 2011
By Nicholas G. Luviene, from “Building a Platform for Economic Democracy: A Cooperative Development Strategy for the Bronx.” © 2010 Nicholas G. Luviene. (Note: This excerpt is republished with permission from Mr. Luviene.) Mondragon is located in the Basque region, a...
by Jeffrey Hollender | Jul 20, 2011
“That the Italian and Basque cooperatives have grown so large is somewhat a mystery since, unlike capitalist enterprises, cooperatives are not expansionist by nature…Capitalist enterprises tend towards growth because increased scale generally leads to greater...
by Jeffrey Hollender | Jul 18, 2011
(Note: This blog post is republished from the original, published on July 14, 2011, hosted by the MIT CoLab and accessible here.) It used to be that dissatisfied Americans looked for ways to fix the economy when it wasn’t working for them, using policy adjustments and...
by Jeffrey Hollender | May 25, 2011
For some, the taste of chocolate is bittersweet. Seventy percent of the world’s cocoa comes from small-scale family farmers in West Africa, whose economy is critically dependent on cocoa (revenues account for more than 33 percent of Ghana’s total export earnings and...
by Jeffrey Hollender | May 12, 2011
Our economic future, though built by the architects of then and now, lies in the hands of the next generation. And that future looks bright, based on the strong ideals of some of the students coming out of undergraduate and graduate business programs nationwide. The...
by Jeffrey Hollender | Apr 27, 2011
We have before us an incredible opportunity to transform our economy. The disastrous turn our fiscal health took in 2008 has forced us to really think about the way our country creates and distributes wealth. One positive outcome of the recession is a zeal and...
