by Jeffrey Hollender | Aug 5, 2011
Fred Freundlich, a native of the Boston area, moved to Mondragon for the first time in 1982, in his mid-twenties. He was fascinated by a business world that he believed was impossible to create. Corporations that value human dignity over profits were, in his...
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 | Jul 13, 2011
A better way is possible. We spend more than $110 billion fighting wars in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but are plagued with a poverty rate of more than 17 percent. At 6.7 deaths per 1,000 live births, the U.S. had the highest infant mortality rate among the high-income...
by Jeffrey Hollender | Jul 11, 2011
A recent international survey conducted by Accenture revealed some pretty interesting statistics about the state of sustainability in the mindset of corporate leaders. Though a majority see the benefits — namely in reputation and trust (cited by 49% of...
