Equity: Why Employee Ownership Is Good for Business.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: BookSHELF - Brief Article - Book Review

Equity: Why Employee Ownership Is Good for Business. By Corey Rosen, John Case and Martin Staubus. Harvard Business School Press, 214 pages. $27.50.

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The Internet companies that rocketed up and then imploded in the late 1990s and into 2000 may have had failed business models, but they had latched on to something important: it can be tremendously attractive to make employees owners and/or partners in the enterprise.

That idea is at the heart of Equity, which is written by an unusual troika: an executive at a nonprofit dedicated to employee ownership (Rosen), a business journalist and author (Case) and an academic heading an institute dedicated to employee ownership (Staubus). They argue that when correctly established, the concept can serve as the cornerstone of a powerful, effective model of management. As they point out, 80 percent of the companies on Fortune's list of the "100...