A calling ...

"We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims."

"Make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone."

- Buckminster Fuller

Friday, April 8, 2011

President Obama comments on ESOPs

President Obama Q and A Part 01 -- wtvr
From 1985 until 2001, I worked for Allied Plywood Corporation, one of the world's first 100% employee-owned companies, where I did everything from work in the warehouse, in a lumber mill, in purchasing, sales, credit, as an operations manager, and served as an at-large member of the Board of Directors. In 1986, I sat a dinner table with Dr. Lawrence Kohlberg at an annual conference for the Center for Economic and Social Justice. He invited me to attend a conference on School Climate and Governance at Harvard University, because he was interested in learning more about Allied Plywood's "ownership culture." I left Allied, in great part, because of flaws in its ownership culture, but mostly because I had always known that I was in the wrong business for me.

At the conference, I got to interact with inner-city educators, and some students from the cocaine regions in Columbia. Kohlberg had developed a theory of moral stages that was being tested in some of the toughest schools in the nation, where students were being locked inside schools to prevent gun violence. Schools were using moral dilemmas and student centered adjudication to teach ethics as an essential part of school discipline plans.

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